Just finished ep 2 and the tension still hasn’t let up. Sun’s stare does so much of the work, there’s this anger sitting right underneath it the whole time, like it could go off any second.
Also, is it just me, or does Min kind of look like Takizawa Hideaki from Majo no Jouken at certain angles? Something about the way he shifts from soft and boyish to a little dark in the same shot. I couldn’t look away during the close-ups.
In episode 7, the horror of the scene is in the not-knowing. Gaysorn drives the shovel into the ground with no idea it’s his mother down there, and every push of the blade carries him closer to something he can’t take back. That alone sits in your chest. So when the hand bones become visible, it feels like too much. Instead of deepening the dread, it pulls me out of it and answers the question before he, or I, are ready to ask it.
The scene was already there in the dirt sliding away and the moment something shifts in his face before he even understands why. That awful half-second your mind fills in is always worse, always truer, than anything the camera can show you. I get wanting the horror to be undeniable, but the scenes that haunt me for days are never the ones that show me everything. They’re the ones that trust me to arrive at the terrible truth at the same pace he does, and that gap is where it actually hurts.
The cruelest thing about this show is that it almost never says THIS IS SIN out loud. It just lines things up, one detail at a time, and waits for you to land on it yourself: oh. So this is what people mean when they talk about straying from the right path.
Four moments in this episode would not let me go.
The first is the close-ups of Tanrak’s eyes. Not the confessions or the breakdowns; those I was braced for. It is the small shots, him sitting right next to Barth with what feels like an entire church wedged into the space between them. He barely looks up, and when he does it is sideways, out of the corner of his eye, like holding the look a second too long would trip some invisible wire. Shyness does not really cover it. It reads more like: if I actually look at you, I will have to admit something I am not allowed to admit.
He is a C major chord straining to stay in tune. Clean, stable, exactly what the textbook says a good chord should be. People look at him and see a good student, a good believer, a good son. Then Barth gets close and you can almost hear the chord start to shake. The vibration is tiny. He is convinced everyone can hear it. Nobody can.
Then there is the music question, which is where the episode really got me. I love that the show refuses to write Barth as some clueless outsider. He asks Tanrak his favorite chord, and on the surface it is nothing, just something to say. But Tanrak answers “C.” Of every chord he could have named, he picks the simplest, most defensible one: the home chord, the major triad, the place songs start and end. That is the answer of someone who badly wants to live inside a key he can justify to anyone who asks.
Barth’s reply is sharper than the small talk deserves. He does not nod along. He reaches over, counts up the keyboard, and presses the first of the two black keys, that little sliver between C and D. C-sharp, he says. His favorite. Then he mentions, almost in passing, that he has always felt a bit out of place in groups.
I rewound that part twice and I am still not sure I caught everything Barth’s face was doing. But the metaphor is doing the heavy lifting on its own. One boy claims the home chord; the other claims the half step. C is where everyone is comfortable. C-sharp never fully belongs to any clean major key. There is nothing wrong with C. It is literally what the exercises are built on. But the second C-sharp shows up, the music stops being pure in the way the system wants it to be. The note does not break the system, it just will not lie flat inside it.
Then the riddle: a believer, a lover, and a lost one. One always tells the truth, one always lies, one does both depending on the day. The believer says the lover always tells the truth. The lover says the lost one always lies. The lost one says the believer does not always tell the truth.
It looks like a tidy contest problem, the kind with one clean answer waiting at the bottom. The harder you push on it, though, the more it slips. Each line is trying to fix the others’ nature in place, permanently, and that reaches past whatever rules the puzzle set for itself. Sit with it long enough and you stop finding the single correct solution, because it is not really there.
Which is exactly the moment Barth chooses. He thinks, and then he says the lost one is the one telling the truth.
Strictly speaking, that is not forced. The structure is too loose; you can hand out “truth-teller” and “liar” and “sometimes” a few different ways without the whole thing falling apart. But if you stop treating it as math and treat it as a question about who you trust, his answer snaps into place. He gives the truth to the one the system has labeled LOST, not to the believer, not to the lover. In a world where the church gets to decide who is righteous and who has wandered off, Barth quietly says no. The one you call lost is the one being honest about your believer.
For Tanrak that is a soft blow that somehow draws blood. His whole identity rests on the believer being the one who holds the truth. Hearing “actually, it is the lost one who is honest about you” does not just nick the doctrine, it goes after his place inside it. If the lost person is the truthful one, then what is he guarding by being the good believer?
By daylight he still has his C-chord answer. The careful glances, the routine prayers, the model-student face. But that night, when he steadies Barth over the wall and his hand lands on Barth’s thigh, the half step finally gets played out loud. His body knows something his theology has no words for.
So when he cannot sleep afterward, when he ends up in the bathroom, it does not read as a stock hormones scene. It is the first time the forbidden thing becomes an actual act: secret, ashamed, and also more honest than anything he says in the daylight. For a few minutes he stops being the chord everyone expects and lets himself sound like C-sharp in the dark.
A lot of shows would crank that moment up. Heavy breathing, swelling music, maybe a voiceover groaning “I am a sinner” in case we were not paying attention. Ticket to Heaven just gives us a boy at a keyboard, a boy at a wall, a boy in a bathroom, and trusts us to feel it without a line of dialogue spelling it out.
I keep coming back to that one line, the lost one is telling the truth. Maybe it is because a lot of us were trained to trust whoever stood at the front of the room, the pastor or the teacher or the parent, and to doubt anyone who stepped outside the lines. LOST was the word for people who loved the wrong way or wanted the wrong things or asked the wrong questions. Here the truth does not come from the pulpit at all. It comes from the margins, and the only person who recognizes it is another boy who does not quite fit either.
Tanrak’s whole night plays like one long unanswered question: if he really is the believer they say he is, why does he only feel awake listening to the note they call wrong? The episode does not tell us. It does not save anyone or damn anyone. It just sits with a carefully tuned life and lets us hear the first place it slips out of key.
We’ve had our share of time-travel BLs, but this one stands out: thoughtful, well-built, and complete in a way a lot of them aren’t. And the reincarnation angle? Even from a Western lens, the idea that love finds you again across lifetimes is honestly pretty easy to fall for.
At this point I literally cannot tell where Toto and Kanit end and Tay and New begin, and you know what? That’s the magic. My favorite walking argument of a couple. I blink and the episode’s over. DROP the next one already!! 🔥
Oh my GOD, Wayu, stop crying, you’re too pretty for this. Like, what do you even want — tall? hot? Tell me…
YESSS Wayu!! Oh my GOD, finally! Look at you, hot stuff, glowing already! We are SO back. Single, hot, and thriving… that’s the vibe! Boys, watch OUT, ’kay? 🎉✨
Oh my GOD, Wayu, stop crying, you’re too pretty for this. Like, what do you even want — tall? hot? Tell me and I’ll handle it, ’kay? We do not cry over boys, that is so not the vibe. NEXT!
Nao is so attentive, so quietly thoughtful in every little thing he does, that Tiger falling for him feels less like a choice and more like something that was always going to happen. Six years of carrying that feeling, and you completely get why.
Tiger leads with his heart just as much. His family has ties to the Thai underworld, but this episode plays a lot more like a romantic comedy than a crime drama. His two friends decide to play matchmaker, which is very funny, and his older brother’s obvious soft spot for him is a real delight. Even Nao’s whole family getting kidnapped never turns into anything too heavy, since you already know how it’ll end: Tiger will find a way to bring them home.
The scene where Shito and Futami argue while Yotsuya is passed out drunk was so well done. Hirai Amon gives Futami real depth. He even slips into a Kansai accent when he talks, which fits the backstory that Futami had previously been transferred to the Osaka branch. It wasn’t until I looked him up that I found out Hirai was born in Mie Prefecture. Turns out he’s actually a Kansai native himself.
This episode picks up the jealousy theme from before. There’s this whole dynamic of two men sizing each other up, and the headspace behind it is complicated. In real life, rivalry isn’t always rooted in pure hostility. Sometimes there’s genuine respect and admiration mixed in. And in the world of BL, well, there could be other feelings in play too.
And I was stuck in a meeting with my manager for almost 40 minutes, mid part 2! I swear to everything holy and…
Those memorable Thursdays will haunt us both forever and I wouldn’t change a thing 😌 And babe please, the way you just went off cursing out every single department like a one woman standing ovation? I ADORE it. Fk their acting, fk the drone team, fk the CGI, fk them ALL, you’re so right and you should say it louder.
You never have to know what to comment, just keep yelling into the void with me and I’ll always yell back. Love you to bits 💕
And I was stuck in a meeting with my manager for almost 40 minutes, mid part 2! I swear to everything holy and…
NOT you almost throwing your whole career into the fire pit for these two 😭 babe that’s not unhinged, that’s DEVOTION. Qi Rong heard you and respected the hustle. And honestly chewing on Pete’s chains is exactly where I’d be too, no notes, flawless instinct.
Okay but the cone hats?? I get the hint. I get it SO hard. We are not okay, we are never going to be okay, and that’s kind of the whole point lol 🤭
Anyway listen, about the shirt 😩 you are the most generous angel for even offering, but the delivery fee alone would cost more than my soul (which, let’s be real, Niran already bound to Pete’s, so it’s not even on the market). Please don’t spend that on me. I’ll find a way to get my grubby little hands on one myself, I swear.
You’re seriously the best thing in this whole fandom and I love you to bits. Now go say sorry to your manager for checking out mid meeting 💕
Okay WHO gave this show the right?? 45 minutes flew by like five minutes and now I have to white-knuckle it through SEVEN. WHOLE. DAYS. The disrespect.
So Qi Rong pulls out the mist and splits all nine of them up, and the fog basically forces each of them to stare down their own worst fear / inner demon / personal villain origin story. Cinema. Genuinely the laziest-genius way to do nine character studies at once and I’m OBSESSED.
Side note — Tong’s mist-monster reads super androgynous, and I cannot stop side-eyeing it. Is the show low-key teasing some gender stuff for him, or is it just externalizing his fear of not measuring up to Big Manly Expectations™? Could go either way and I need the next few eps to TELL ME which.
Also I screamed “WE ARE THE WU!” out loud like a deranged person. Where is the merch. I need the exact tee Niran and Pete were wearing, in my hands, framed, in a museum.
Episode title pitch: “Tied The Knot!” Because to leash the six-eared macaque, Niran goes “cool cool cool I’ll just BIND MY SOUL TO PETE’S.” Sir. SIR. The shippers are deceased. I am writing this from the afterlife.
And THEN — pre-ritual, Pete’s terrified, so Niran takes off his own necklace, slips it over Pete’s head, cradles the back of his skull, and murmurs the most tender pep talk known to man. I shrieked so hard my cat full-on glared at me. She thinks I’ve lost it. She’s correct.
Tiny nitpick for my Chinese-literate besties: the white robes on the three helper kids have 祭 (“sacrifice”) written WRONG. Props department, I love you, but we got caught. 🙏 (Praying nobody’s offended.)
Why I can’t see Save and Guy as “just friends who fell out”
Maybe this is less about what the show explicitly says and more about what I want from it, but I can’t bring myself to read Save and Guy as just two friends who drift apart. Part of it is simple: I want a happy ending for them. But the bigger reason is that the story itself feels like it’s building toward something deeper, especially when it comes to Save.
Because Save doesn’t read like a secretly-gay-all-along character. He starts off as your typical straight high school boy. Nothing in the early episodes suggests he’s been quietly struggling with his sexuality this whole time, and that’s exactly why his arc matters. Guy, on the other hand, is much clearer from the beginning. His anxiety about losing Save isn’t just about friendship. It feels like he’s already a little in love with him. They’re not starting from the same place at all. Guy already knows where he stands, while Save doesn’t even realize there’s something to question yet.
So when the confession happens, Save’s reaction is everything. He doesn’t magically realize he feels the same, and he doesn’t neatly reject it either. He just shuts down. He avoids Guy, can’t meet his eyes, and doesn’t know how to act. A lot of people read that as him trying to protect the friendship, which is part of it, sure. But it also feels like something deeper. He genuinely doesn’t know how to fit this into the version of himself he’s always believed in. That’s what questioning looks like. It’s messy and uncomfortable, and it doesn’t come with instant clarity.
Then the show throws in the fake dating setup, which is ridiculous on paper, I’ll admit. But that’s also where the story really shifts, because fake dating only works if something starts to become real. The question stops being “is he doing this for a reason?” and becomes “when did this stop being an act?”
And by the second half, it’s clearly not an act anymore. The tension between them, the misunderstandings, the way they hurt each other, none of that reads like casual friendship drama. Save completely falls apart when Guy pulls away. He goes out of his way, almost desperately, to fix things. And the overpass scene alone makes it hard to argue this is just about friendship. You don’t chase someone like that, with that much urgency and emotion, if they’re only a friend. At that point, Guy has become the center of his world.
That’s why the “he was straight the whole time and just went along with it” interpretation doesn’t work for me. It reduces everything he goes through into a phase, something temporary or superficial. But what we actually see is a shift. Save starts from a place where being straight is just an assumption, something he’s never had to question. Then Guy disrupts that, and over time Save is forced to confront feelings he doesn’t have language for yet.
To me, it makes much more sense to read him as somewhere on the bi or pan spectrum by the end. Not because the show explicitly labels it, but because that’s where his journey leads. He doesn’t “turn gay.” He expands his understanding of himself. Whether you call that bi or pan doesn’t really matter. What matters is that he gets there through experience, confusion, and emotional growth.
And that’s what makes his choice meaningful. If he ends up choosing Guy, it isn’t because he was secretly waiting for him all along, and it isn’t because he’s experimenting. It’s because he’s figured something out about himself, and from that place, he chooses the person he loves.
So even if part of this is me wanting a happier ending than the show might fully give, it doesn’t feel like a stretch. The emotional arc is already there. Read that way, this isn’t just a story about friendship falling apart. It’s about someone stumbling into self-understanding and, in the process, realizing who actually matters to him. And honestly, that version is the one that stays with me.
I Took Way Too Many Notes on Episode 1, So Here You Go
1. The instant Barth stepped into the church and the cross came down right before him, I couldn’t help thinking that toppled cross is carrying an enormous amount of symbolic weight.
2. From its very first frames, the show radiates a sense of impending tragedy. I can’t shake the feeling that Tanrak (Fourth) and Barth (Gemini) aren’t destined to end up together.
3. As for who will be formally ordained into the priesthood at the upcoming ceremony, my money is on either Kongdech (Achi) or Kongkit (Pun).
4. The story opens on January 22, 2025, and I suspect the director chose that date with intention, as it marks the first day Thailand’s marriage equality law came into force. The symbolism is hard to miss, and it quietly signals that this is no ordinary romance BL.
5. The man behind the wheel in the opening of episode one is our lead, Barth, and a closer look reveals his hair has already turned gray. We come to learn this love story began in 1996, when Barth arrived as a transfer student in his final year of high school. If he was roughly 17 then, that places him somewhere around 45 or 46 by 2025.
6. The Catholic church Barth travels to is Holy Family Church in Pathum Thani, Thailand, and the drone shot lingers long enough to catch its grand “Holy Family” lettering. Built in 1896, it’s a place steeped in history, and well worth a quiet pilgrimage should you ever find yourself in Thailand (a trip I’ve yet to make myself).
7. The shower scene introduces the boarding school’s principal bully, Kongkit. Even before Barth enters the bathhouse, Kongkit and his friends are already tormenting a younger boy, Prince (Guitar), and the cruelty of their exchange leaves little doubt about Kongkit’s homophobia. Prince’s sexuality had somehow become known to them, and they descend on him with both words and force while the others bathe. Barth and Kongdech stand nearby, and though they plainly sense the wrongness of it, neither intervenes. It left me wondering whether Kongkit might be gay himself. History offers no shortage of powerful figures who persecuted gay men, only to be exposed later. Outward homophobia is so often equal parts self-preservation and something more deeply distorted beneath the surface.
8. This episode also gives us that remarkably gifted child actor, the one with such a gift for tears, in the role of young Tanrak. Between Duang With You, Love You Teacher, and now this, I find myself wondering whether he’s on his way to becoming a BL actor in his own right.
9. The abandoned swimming pool is something of a landmark in Thai BL filming. I’m fairly certain it appeared in The Blue Hour, the 2015 drama featuring a young GunATP. Countless productions have passed through it over the past decade and more, and yet there it remains, as abandoned as ever.
Phop’s dad hits him with the classic: “Do you realize you’re throwing your life away?” And Phop just fires back, “It’s my life. If it’s going to get wrecked, it’ll be by my own hands, not yours.” That lands, because once his dad sees how set Phop is on this, he steps back and lets his son live the life he actually wants.
Honestly? A father reacting to his son coming out with that kind of grace would be a perfect 10 even today. That’s a rare breed of good dad you almost never run into, and we’re talking centuries ago here.
You know you're in for a banger when oddsare slides into your DM and tells you to watch it! 😁 It gives very…
A masochist who signed up for the slow burn AND the revenge arc?? 😭 We’re gonna be feral together every week — I’m betting nasty too, popcorn already ready. 🍿🔥
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Also, is it just me, or does Min kind of look like Takizawa Hideaki from Majo no Jouken at certain angles? Something about the way he shifts from soft and boyish to a little dark in the same shot. I couldn’t look away during the close-ups.
The scene was already there in the dirt sliding away and the moment something shifts in his face before he even understands why. That awful half-second your mind fills in is always worse, always truer, than anything the camera can show you. I get wanting the horror to be undeniable, but the scenes that haunt me for days are never the ones that show me everything. They’re the ones that trust me to arrive at the terrible truth at the same pace he does, and that gap is where it actually hurts.
Four moments in this episode would not let me go.
The first is the close-ups of Tanrak’s eyes. Not the confessions or the breakdowns; those I was braced for. It is the small shots, him sitting right next to Barth with what feels like an entire church wedged into the space between them. He barely looks up, and when he does it is sideways, out of the corner of his eye, like holding the look a second too long would trip some invisible wire. Shyness does not really cover it. It reads more like: if I actually look at you, I will have to admit something I am not allowed to admit.
He is a C major chord straining to stay in tune. Clean, stable, exactly what the textbook says a good chord should be. People look at him and see a good student, a good believer, a good son. Then Barth gets close and you can almost hear the chord start to shake. The vibration is tiny. He is convinced everyone can hear it. Nobody can.
Then there is the music question, which is where the episode really got me. I love that the show refuses to write Barth as some clueless outsider. He asks Tanrak his favorite chord, and on the surface it is nothing, just something to say. But Tanrak answers “C.” Of every chord he could have named, he picks the simplest, most defensible one: the home chord, the major triad, the place songs start and end. That is the answer of someone who badly wants to live inside a key he can justify to anyone who asks.
Barth’s reply is sharper than the small talk deserves. He does not nod along. He reaches over, counts up the keyboard, and presses the first of the two black keys, that little sliver between C and D. C-sharp, he says. His favorite. Then he mentions, almost in passing, that he has always felt a bit out of place in groups.
I rewound that part twice and I am still not sure I caught everything Barth’s face was doing. But the metaphor is doing the heavy lifting on its own. One boy claims the home chord; the other claims the half step. C is where everyone is comfortable. C-sharp never fully belongs to any clean major key. There is nothing wrong with C. It is literally what the exercises are built on. But the second C-sharp shows up, the music stops being pure in the way the system wants it to be. The note does not break the system, it just will not lie flat inside it.
Then the riddle: a believer, a lover, and a lost one. One always tells the truth, one always lies, one does both depending on the day. The believer says the lover always tells the truth. The lover says the lost one always lies. The lost one says the believer does not always tell the truth.
It looks like a tidy contest problem, the kind with one clean answer waiting at the bottom. The harder you push on it, though, the more it slips. Each line is trying to fix the others’ nature in place, permanently, and that reaches past whatever rules the puzzle set for itself. Sit with it long enough and you stop finding the single correct solution, because it is not really there.
Which is exactly the moment Barth chooses. He thinks, and then he says the lost one is the one telling the truth.
Strictly speaking, that is not forced. The structure is too loose; you can hand out “truth-teller” and “liar” and “sometimes” a few different ways without the whole thing falling apart. But if you stop treating it as math and treat it as a question about who you trust, his answer snaps into place. He gives the truth to the one the system has labeled LOST, not to the believer, not to the lover. In a world where the church gets to decide who is righteous and who has wandered off, Barth quietly says no. The one you call lost is the one being honest about your believer.
For Tanrak that is a soft blow that somehow draws blood. His whole identity rests on the believer being the one who holds the truth. Hearing “actually, it is the lost one who is honest about you” does not just nick the doctrine, it goes after his place inside it. If the lost person is the truthful one, then what is he guarding by being the good believer?
By daylight he still has his C-chord answer. The careful glances, the routine prayers, the model-student face. But that night, when he steadies Barth over the wall and his hand lands on Barth’s thigh, the half step finally gets played out loud. His body knows something his theology has no words for.
So when he cannot sleep afterward, when he ends up in the bathroom, it does not read as a stock hormones scene. It is the first time the forbidden thing becomes an actual act: secret, ashamed, and also more honest than anything he says in the daylight. For a few minutes he stops being the chord everyone expects and lets himself sound like C-sharp in the dark.
A lot of shows would crank that moment up. Heavy breathing, swelling music, maybe a voiceover groaning “I am a sinner” in case we were not paying attention. Ticket to Heaven just gives us a boy at a keyboard, a boy at a wall, a boy in a bathroom, and trusts us to feel it without a line of dialogue spelling it out.
I keep coming back to that one line, the lost one is telling the truth. Maybe it is because a lot of us were trained to trust whoever stood at the front of the room, the pastor or the teacher or the parent, and to doubt anyone who stepped outside the lines. LOST was the word for people who loved the wrong way or wanted the wrong things or asked the wrong questions. Here the truth does not come from the pulpit at all. It comes from the margins, and the only person who recognizes it is another boy who does not quite fit either.
Tanrak’s whole night plays like one long unanswered question: if he really is the believer they say he is, why does he only feel awake listening to the note they call wrong? The episode does not tell us. It does not save anyone or damn anyone. It just sits with a carefully tuned life and lets us hear the first place it slips out of key.
Ah, and next week is the finale. Not ready. 🥹
Tiger leads with his heart just as much. His family has ties to the Thai underworld, but this episode plays a lot more like a romantic comedy than a crime drama. His two friends decide to play matchmaker, which is very funny, and his older brother’s obvious soft spot for him is a real delight. Even Nao’s whole family getting kidnapped never turns into anything too heavy, since you already know how it’ll end: Tiger will find a way to bring them home.
Can’t wait for the next episode.
This episode picks up the jealousy theme from before. There’s this whole dynamic of two men sizing each other up, and the headspace behind it is complicated. In real life, rivalry isn’t always rooted in pure hostility. Sometimes there’s genuine respect and admiration mixed in. And in the world of BL, well, there could be other feelings in play too.
Can’t wait for the next episode.
You never have to know what to comment, just keep yelling into the void with me and I’ll always yell back. Love you to bits 💕
Okay but the cone hats?? I get the hint. I get it SO hard. We are not okay, we are never going to be okay, and that’s kind of the whole point lol 🤭
Anyway listen, about the shirt 😩 you are the most generous angel for even offering, but the delivery fee alone would cost more than my soul (which, let’s be real, Niran already bound to Pete’s, so it’s not even on the market). Please don’t spend that on me. I’ll find a way to get my grubby little hands on one myself, I swear.
You’re seriously the best thing in this whole fandom and I love you to bits. Now go say sorry to your manager for checking out mid meeting 💕
So Qi Rong pulls out the mist and splits all nine of them up, and the fog basically forces each of them to stare down their own worst fear / inner demon / personal villain origin story. Cinema. Genuinely the laziest-genius way to do nine character studies at once and I’m OBSESSED.
Side note — Tong’s mist-monster reads super androgynous, and I cannot stop side-eyeing it. Is the show low-key teasing some gender stuff for him, or is it just externalizing his fear of not measuring up to Big Manly Expectations™? Could go either way and I need the next few eps to TELL ME which.
Also I screamed “WE ARE THE WU!” out loud like a deranged person. Where is the merch. I need the exact tee Niran and Pete were wearing, in my hands, framed, in a museum.
Episode title pitch: “Tied The Knot!” Because to leash the six-eared macaque, Niran goes “cool cool cool I’ll just BIND MY SOUL TO PETE’S.” Sir. SIR. The shippers are deceased. I am writing this from the afterlife.
And THEN — pre-ritual, Pete’s terrified, so Niran takes off his own necklace, slips it over Pete’s head, cradles the back of his skull, and murmurs the most tender pep talk known to man. I shrieked so hard my cat full-on glared at me. She thinks I’ve lost it. She’s correct.
Tiny nitpick for my Chinese-literate besties: the white robes on the three helper kids have 祭 (“sacrifice”) written WRONG. Props department, I love you, but we got caught. 🙏 (Praying nobody’s offended.)
Maybe this is less about what the show explicitly says and more about what I want from it, but I can’t bring myself to read Save and Guy as just two friends who drift apart. Part of it is simple: I want a happy ending for them. But the bigger reason is that the story itself feels like it’s building toward something deeper, especially when it comes to Save.
Because Save doesn’t read like a secretly-gay-all-along character. He starts off as your typical straight high school boy. Nothing in the early episodes suggests he’s been quietly struggling with his sexuality this whole time, and that’s exactly why his arc matters. Guy, on the other hand, is much clearer from the beginning. His anxiety about losing Save isn’t just about friendship. It feels like he’s already a little in love with him. They’re not starting from the same place at all. Guy already knows where he stands, while Save doesn’t even realize there’s something to question yet.
So when the confession happens, Save’s reaction is everything. He doesn’t magically realize he feels the same, and he doesn’t neatly reject it either. He just shuts down. He avoids Guy, can’t meet his eyes, and doesn’t know how to act. A lot of people read that as him trying to protect the friendship, which is part of it, sure. But it also feels like something deeper. He genuinely doesn’t know how to fit this into the version of himself he’s always believed in. That’s what questioning looks like. It’s messy and uncomfortable, and it doesn’t come with instant clarity.
Then the show throws in the fake dating setup, which is ridiculous on paper, I’ll admit. But that’s also where the story really shifts, because fake dating only works if something starts to become real. The question stops being “is he doing this for a reason?” and becomes “when did this stop being an act?”
And by the second half, it’s clearly not an act anymore. The tension between them, the misunderstandings, the way they hurt each other, none of that reads like casual friendship drama. Save completely falls apart when Guy pulls away. He goes out of his way, almost desperately, to fix things. And the overpass scene alone makes it hard to argue this is just about friendship. You don’t chase someone like that, with that much urgency and emotion, if they’re only a friend. At that point, Guy has become the center of his world.
That’s why the “he was straight the whole time and just went along with it” interpretation doesn’t work for me. It reduces everything he goes through into a phase, something temporary or superficial. But what we actually see is a shift. Save starts from a place where being straight is just an assumption, something he’s never had to question. Then Guy disrupts that, and over time Save is forced to confront feelings he doesn’t have language for yet.
To me, it makes much more sense to read him as somewhere on the bi or pan spectrum by the end. Not because the show explicitly labels it, but because that’s where his journey leads. He doesn’t “turn gay.” He expands his understanding of himself. Whether you call that bi or pan doesn’t really matter. What matters is that he gets there through experience, confusion, and emotional growth.
And that’s what makes his choice meaningful. If he ends up choosing Guy, it isn’t because he was secretly waiting for him all along, and it isn’t because he’s experimenting. It’s because he’s figured something out about himself, and from that place, he chooses the person he loves.
So even if part of this is me wanting a happier ending than the show might fully give, it doesn’t feel like a stretch. The emotional arc is already there. Read that way, this isn’t just a story about friendship falling apart. It’s about someone stumbling into self-understanding and, in the process, realizing who actually matters to him. And honestly, that version is the one that stays with me.
1. The instant Barth stepped into the church and the cross came down right before him, I couldn’t help thinking that toppled cross is carrying an enormous amount of symbolic weight.
2. From its very first frames, the show radiates a sense of impending tragedy. I can’t shake the feeling that Tanrak (Fourth) and Barth (Gemini) aren’t destined to end up together.
3. As for who will be formally ordained into the priesthood at the upcoming ceremony, my money is on either Kongdech (Achi) or Kongkit (Pun).
4. The story opens on January 22, 2025, and I suspect the director chose that date with intention, as it marks the first day Thailand’s marriage equality law came into force. The symbolism is hard to miss, and it quietly signals that this is no ordinary romance BL.
5. The man behind the wheel in the opening of episode one is our lead, Barth, and a closer look reveals his hair has already turned gray. We come to learn this love story began in 1996, when Barth arrived as a transfer student in his final year of high school. If he was roughly 17 then, that places him somewhere around 45 or 46 by 2025.
6. The Catholic church Barth travels to is Holy Family Church in Pathum Thani, Thailand, and the drone shot lingers long enough to catch its grand “Holy Family” lettering. Built in 1896, it’s a place steeped in history, and well worth a quiet pilgrimage should you ever find yourself in Thailand (a trip I’ve yet to make myself).
7. The shower scene introduces the boarding school’s principal bully, Kongkit. Even before Barth enters the bathhouse, Kongkit and his friends are already tormenting a younger boy, Prince (Guitar), and the cruelty of their exchange leaves little doubt about Kongkit’s homophobia. Prince’s sexuality had somehow become known to them, and they descend on him with both words and force while the others bathe. Barth and Kongdech stand nearby, and though they plainly sense the wrongness of it, neither intervenes. It left me wondering whether Kongkit might be gay himself. History offers no shortage of powerful figures who persecuted gay men, only to be exposed later. Outward homophobia is so often equal parts self-preservation and something more deeply distorted beneath the surface.
8. This episode also gives us that remarkably gifted child actor, the one with such a gift for tears, in the role of young Tanrak. Between Duang With You, Love You Teacher, and now this, I find myself wondering whether he’s on his way to becoming a BL actor in his own right.
9. The abandoned swimming pool is something of a landmark in Thai BL filming. I’m fairly certain it appeared in The Blue Hour, the 2015 drama featuring a young GunATP. Countless productions have passed through it over the past decade and more, and yet there it remains, as abandoned as ever.
Honestly? A father reacting to his son coming out with that kind of grace would be a perfect 10 even today. That’s a rare breed of good dad you almost never run into, and we’re talking centuries ago here.