The title is already an argument. Before a single scene plays, it tells you this is going to be a story about people who step so far into a role that they lose track of where the role ends and they begin.
入戲 looks simple on the surface. It means to enter the drama, that moment when an actor stops watching the story from the outside and finally lets himself walk into it. But this adaptation never lets the word stay technical. 入戲 becomes its way of describing people who cross lines they were never meant to cross, then stay on the far side long enough that “acting” no longer feels like an honest word for what they are doing.
The English title sharpens that. Deep In is not enter the drama and leave when the director calls cut. It is sinking, staying under, being held there. Deep in the role. Deep in the story. Deep in someone else’s world. There is something almost airless about the phrase, a buried promise that what you are watching is not just immersion but entanglement, the kind nobody walks away from clean.
The shape of the source novel is what makes that double title feel deliberate. There is the actor line on the outside and the doctor and patient line folded inside the film they are shooting. Zhen Xin and Zhang Zhun are supposed to be professionals. They share a space, study scripts, watch films together, rehearse intimacy because the job asks for it. On paper they are two actors entering a project. In the texture of the show, every step closer reads as another layer of 入戲. They are not only entering the drama they are paid to perform. They are entering each other, mostly without naming it, sometimes without admitting it even to themselves.
Zhen Xin’s name does a lot of quiet work here. 甄心 (Zhēn Xīn) sits right next to 真心 (zhēn xīn), true heart, close enough that you cannot unhear it. Early on he plays like a man standing above the situation. He has status, craft, a cool kind of clarity. He can afford to study Zhang Zhun from a distance, test him, weigh how much effort he is worth. Those first episodes slowly rewrite the name into a question. Will this man ever let his true heart surface, or is all of it controlled performance. By the end of the early run it is hard to keep calling it pretending. The attention he pays Zhang Zhun has stopped being about landing a better take. It has become something closer to actual care, actual investment. The title promised 入戲. His name confirms he has gone past the safe version of it.
Inside the film within the film, 入戲 gets considerably darker. Fang Zhi is a psychologist, and that role arrives with its own architecture of boundaries. He is supposed to hold a space that is structured and ethical and safe, especially for someone like Gao Zhun, whose history is full of trauma and violated consent. In that world the line between doctor and patient is not up for negotiation. So when Fang Zhi starts to forget it, the show refuses to frame it as a minor slip. It makes his choices the pressure point the whole story turns on.
He does not simply fall in love. He lets his professional position bleed into something else, something laced with desire and control and a need to matter to this person in a way that has stopped being therapeutic. A space meant for repair becomes a place where old wounds and new attachments keep overlapping. That is its own kind of 入戲. The doctor enters the patient’s world too far, and instead of holding him at a careful distance, he starts living inside that vulnerability with him. The series does not file this neatly under romance, and it does not file it neatly under abuse either. It leaves you in a more uncomfortable middle, in the overlap, where care and overreach are running at the same time.
That discomfort is where the story turns quietly postmodern. The usual anchors start slipping. The doctor is not a stable figure of authority. The actor is not just a worker executing a script. The pairs that normally keep a narrative legible stop behaving like clean opposites and begin folding into one another: professional against personal, ethical against unethical, performance against reality. Fang Zhi is healer and transgressor at once. Zhen Xin is calculating star and someone who has plainly, genuinely started to care. The film inside the film is both fiction and mirror, and the mirror keeps rearranging the lives of the men holding it up.
Which is what makes Deep In such an exact English name. Everyone here is in too far. The actors are in too far with their roles and with each other. The doctor is in too far with his patient. The boundaries that are supposed to keep people safe come apart: between work and feeling, between ethics and desire, between the story and the life. 入戲 carries the ordinary meaning of stepping into a role. This adaptation reaches for the more unsettling half of it, the part that asks what happens when no one can quite remember the way back out.
Past tragedies and the weight of his own guilt have pushed Sun into a kind of dissociative state, leaving him emotionally blank. As Jay points out, he doesn’t cry, doesn’t push back, doesn’t even lash out; he just seems dulled.
Because he feels so little, even the idea that Jay could be Arthur, the man he has been searching for, doesn’t quite register as believable. He can’t bring himself to accept that things might finally be straightforward, or that he could be lucky for once. In his mind, his life has always been like that of a boxing sparring partner, there to quietly absorb one hit after another.
Episode 5, to me, really comes down to one sentence: a boy raised his whole life to walk toward God actually falls for someone, and the ground starts to tip.
One. From light to shadow: a love that grows in the corners
The beginning is genuinely bright.
The laundry scene kills me. They wring out a sheet together, hang it up, and suddenly there’s a white wall of fabric. They slip behind it and kiss; all we see is shadow. The shot is clean, still, secretly romantic. Love sprouts behind the sheet first, not under the sun.
Then come the notes and the music. “I want to hear you sing every day.” “Which note is your favorite?” “You’re my most beautiful note.”
In the dorm they edge closer during the movie. In the music room they play the organ together. A sheep appears in the notebook, and a song called “Tan Kham Wa Rak.” He isn’t only singing for God anymore; he’s started singing for a person.
But the light gets shoved into shadow fast.
The waterfall trip that felt like freedom gets brushed off as “boring.” The rosary goes missing and turns up on Barth; Kongdech finds it, and suddenly it looks wrong. In the storage room Barth says he’s tired of hiding, a shadow flickers past the door, and they bolt. When someone comes in, they fold into the corner; he clutches the rosary, terror written all over his face.
Same campus, same closeness, but the air shifts from open to “ready to disappear at any moment.”
Two. Water and fire: pushing his head underwater, then burning the memories himself Water keeps changing shape.
The waterfall is freedom, where the rules don’t quite reach. The laundry is everyday water, carrying his mother’s memory.
After the priest crosses his path in the hallway, he’s in a cold sweat. Then he goes to the big washroom and drives his head under the tap. It’s not washing anymore. It’s punishment: get a grip, you’re not supposed to feel this.
Later, lying in bed after evening study, he remembers Barth’s doodles and notes are still in that notebook, and panic hits. He runs to the office in the dark and digs out every slip of paper, every page.
He takes a lighter to the abandoned pool, the same one that used to be full of water: the place he and Barth once spent a night. Now the empty basin becomes a stage for fire, and he burns the paper one sheet at a time.
Water used to hold them up. Fire eats their words. He thinks burning it severs the cord; I think it tattoos him instead. No matter how he tries to deny it later, he’ll remember standing in that exact spot, trying to end things while the firelight swallowed every trace of “I love you.”
Three. Rosary, notebook, notes: everyday tools of faith touched by love
Small ordinary objects keep getting tangled with love.
The rosary is supposed to be his line to faith, the one around his neck. It ends up on Barth. Kongdech picks it up and says, “For a second I didn’t know who to give it back to.” It’s funny and a little brutal: when one religious object fits on two people, you already know there’s something between them.
The notebook is for homework and theology, and now it’s holding a sheep, a melody, a folded note in the seam. The moment it’s about to be collected for the priest’s comments, the notebook turns into “an intimate file an authority might open.” No wonder he can’t lie still.
The notes start out tucked into his locker, the scripture, the notebook folds, little things like “sing every day” and “most beautiful note.” In the end he gathers them all, drags them to the bottom of the pool, and burns them together.
I love this choice. Love doesn’t only live in kisses and big speeches; it seeps into the rosary, the notebook, the paper, objects that were supposed to belong to faith and routine. He tries to hide the love, and instead he leaves fingerprints on everything.
Four. The gaze and the confession: scared of being seen, brave enough to say it
The whole episode wrestles with being seen.
The sheet-shadow kiss is staged for us, and feels like a hint: in God’s line of sight, love never really hides. Then there are the friends. The missing rosary. The collected notebook. The volunteer scene where he can no longer promise he’ll follow the religious path. When Joe hears “ordained or not, I’ll still come visit you,” his face is pure worry.
The hallway encounter with the priest is even harsher. Nothing explodes, but he’s drenched in sweat, his hand twisting his trousers into a knot. His body gives away the guilt and fear before any words do.
Under that pressure he steps into the confessional and finally says:
“Father, I’ve fallen in love with someone. Even though I know it’s wrong. I tried to stop myself and I couldn’t. I’m furious at myself because I can’t control this feeling. Father, I’m afraid. I’m afraid God will abandon me.”
He lays three things down at once: this is love; he’s been taught it’s wrong; and what terrifies him most is that God might not want him anymore.
The confession isn’t just asking to be forgiven. It’s the first time he lets himself say it inside his faith: I love someone, and it’s tearing me apart.
Five. A straight shot at the breakup: a boy’s question to God
The last conversation is the sharpest cut.
He’s trying to end it. Barth asks, “Have you really never loved me?” He says, “I love you. I love you so much. But what are we supposed to do?”
It’s cruel and honest. He isn’t leaving because he doesn’t love. He loves so much he can’t see any way for that love to survive in this world.
Then Barth says:
“If God teaches us to love, but won’t let us love each other, then what is God even for?”
That’s not calm theology. It’s someone throwing a straight question at the center of his pain. You told me to learn love. I’m loving. You say it can’t be. So what exactly were you teaching me?
I feel split when I hit that line. Part of me thinks he’s incredibly brave, dragging “God” right into the middle of their story. Part of me knows that in real life, people say this and get more silence, more blame, not comfort.
What stays with me: from hiding a love, to putting the whole world on trial for it
These are the Episode 5 details that move me most.
It’s not “two boys have a cute romance.” It’s two boys trying to love inside faith, school rules, and old wounds. For this love he hides, lies, shoves his head under cold water, burns every note in the place they once shared. In the confessional he says: I’ve fallen for someone, I think it’s wrong, I’m scared God doesn’t want me. At the edge of the breakup he says “I love you so much,” and Barth asks, “If that’s how it is, what is a God like that even for?”
What I love about Episode 5 is that it doesn’t keep these questions locked inside them. It says them out loud. It lets the camera sit with them. And when you take all these moments and write them down like this, you’re doing something powerful too: you take a love that spends the whole show hiding in corners, and you walk it out into the light, just long enough for it to be seen properly.
Episode 1 already throws in that “devil” metaphor, and by the time I got to the end, I felt like Jane Patrick is probably going to turn out to be a Fan Xiao–type character from To My Shore. If my hunch is right, we’re in for some full-on possessive love later on, with seriously angsty plot developments.
As a first episode, it totally sold me. I’m absolutely tuning in on time every week.
Greetings received, you lucky thing! 😩 Go enjoy Silom for the both of us, okay? Hit the host bars and take…
Hate to be the bearer of bad news but Saturday’s a no-go, babe, everything’s closed for the election. 😩 Looks like the second floor will have to wait! 💕
Greetings received, you lucky thing! 😩 Go enjoy Silom for the both of us, okay? Hit the host bars and take…
Hahaha you let it slip and now we ALL know 😄 But real talk, the second floor was my whole personality back then, I loved it up there. Take the team and go have a blast for me! 💕
Greetings from Silom, Bangkok(for real)! Told you it's a real place!😁 Damn, If I loved Up for his performance…
Greetings received, you lucky thing! 😩 Go enjoy Silom for the both of us, okay? Hit the host bars and take a double share of fun on my behalf, because this married lady is over here reminiscing about her single Silom days HARD. Have the BEST time at that party, you deserve it! 💕
Just finished episode 1 of The Prosecutor’s Proposal and yeah, immediately hooked. The crime noir vibe with heavy trauma bonding energy is so my thing, and I haven’t even read the novel.
I’m watching with subs so I have to actually pay attention to the case details and office politics, but it never feels like a chore. The pacing is tight, the mood is tense without being loud, and the emotional beats land clearly enough that I lean in instead of zoning out.
Honestly relieved to have a Korean BL that looks this sharp again. Stylish, dark without being edgy for its own sake, and actually interested in telling a real story under the fanservice. Into it enough that I’m heading straight into episode 2.
someone on twitter said "this episode gave us three different confessions. one driven by fear, one by courage,…
Yes, 100%. That framing nails it. Fear is Ko002 getting cornered until it just bursts out of him, courage is Tle owning up the second he's found out instead of dodging, and confidence is Augar reading the correction fluid and calmly turning Achi's own words back on him. Same beat, three completely different emotional engines. Whoever wrote that tweet was paying attention.
Wow, this episode wrecked me. I came so close to crying, and then in the final seconds it somehow twisted everything and made me laugh instead.
These kids can really act. Ko001’s yelling genuinely shook me. That rain scene, with his voice dropping into that rough, gravelly low register while he yells at Ko002, stayed with me long after it ended. There is something about the way he sounds like he is trying to keep himself together and falling apart at the same time that hits very hard. I honestly did not expect someone as young as Progress to keep getting this much better this fast. At this point, I have no idea where his ceiling is, and that is exciting.
This is actually the first time I have seen three couples confess in the same episode, at the exact same emotional beat, all using these sideways little tactics that somehow feel both indirect and painfully direct. The way it is staged and cut together really floored me. Ko002 gets cornered by Ko001 in the rain until he finally snaps and yells, “I like you.” August accidentally pieces together that Tle is the one who has been leaving the notes, which forces Tle to own up to writing them. And Augar quietly works out what Achi tried to hide with correction fluid, then writes Achi’s earlier line back at him: “If he sinks a three-pointer, I’ll confess to him.”
What I love is that none of these are clean, planned confessions. They are all triggered. Someone is pushed, exposed, or found out. Feelings leak out through pressure points, not perfect timing. It makes the whole sequence feel like three emotional locks snapping open at once.
The director is sharp. Really sharp. Stacking three “break the seal” moments together like that could easily have turned into noise, but instead it feels precise. Each couple has a different emotional color, and somehow they still line up in the same rhythm.
I cannot wait for the next episode. Say what you want about this show, but for me it just keeps one-upping itself week after week.
I love your commentary here. When Yim started at Dumundi, he was the epitome of a twink and one would have expected…
Got it, thanks for clarifying. So Yim outgrew Tutor physically but kept the same position in the pairing, the body changed, the role didn't. That's actually a sharper version of the point I was making. And knowing Dumundi plans these soft introductions years in advance does reframe how much of the "chemistry" is deliberate setup. Appreciate you spelling it out.
I thought I’d have to wait until July 1 to watch this, so seeing episode 1 just drop out of nowhere today kind of threw me. Then the theme song starts and it’s Fukuyama Masaharu’s “Hotaru” of all things, in a new version made just for the drama. The second that melody came in I knew this wasn’t going to be pure fluff. There’s a little ache sitting under all that summer glow.
Some of the visuals in episode 1 are genuinely lovely. Mokudai Kazuto really nails Saeki’s quiet crush on Wataru, the kind you catch in sideways glances. I’d already clocked Oku Tomoya from earlier roles, but his slightly fuller cheeks work so well for Toda Wataru here. He reads like an actual clumsy high schooler instead of a polished drama prince, which I loved.
Episode 1 is pretty solid so far. Bright and summery on the surface, and with “Hotaru” wrapped around it you can already feel where this is headed.
Gotta love a brainer series for a change. They did a massive research in order to incorporate all these symbols…
ALREADY?? ok no I’m officially jealous now 😭 have double the fun on my behalf, one share for you and one for me. soak up every second and come back with stories 🩷
Gotta love a brainer series for a change. They did a massive research in order to incorporate all these symbols…
right?? finally a series that rewards you for paying attention instead of just vibing. every time I catch a symbol I feel like the writers left it there specifically for me. the research really shows.
also you are literally about to be in the same room as the source material SOON, do you understand how unfair that is. give Sky and Nani all the energy on our behalf and report back with EVERYTHING. take it all in, you lucky thing 🩷
I love your commentary here. When Yim started at Dumundi, he was the epitome of a twink and one would have expected…
Thank you, and what a deep cut. I had no idea Yim started out as the twink of the pairing, that completely flips how I read his casting now. The idea that the more masculine half of the couple physically grew into that role rather than being cast for it adds a whole layer to what the show is doing with bodies and language. And a cameo forecasting the pairing nine months before it happened is wild foreshadowing. Thanks for digging up the early footage, I'm going to go down this rabbit hole now.
I cannot believe we are already at episode 8. One more episode and that is it. Who approved that. Why is this not a 12 episode drama with one full hour each time. I feel emotionally scammed.
Anyway. The way this episode starts is so sneaky. A few shots in and my brain is already screaming “Saint and Shin.” That scene with Pete on the big motorcycle and Niran on the back feels like someone took High School Frenemy, turned off the school lights, added demons, and said, “Here, relive all that chemistry but now it is cursed.” I am almost sure I am not the only one who saw that and immediately thought of that other timeline.
Then. Qi Rong.
I finally zoomed in on that little seal and saw the Chinese characters 「奇戎」. That was my oh wait a second moment. Suddenly Li Pou calling him 「戰神爺」 gets a lot more interesting. On the surface it sounds like a proper temple style war god title, like something carved on a shrine. But the way he looks on screen is pure 牛魔王 energy. The show grabbed a piece of Chinese myth, dressed it up in local religious language, and dropped it into this Thai fantasy world just to see how much it would mess with my brain. It worked.
And Pete. This boy has a “six eared macaque” living rent free inside him. There is nothing subtle about that. The story is basically nudging me going “you know exactly who this reminds you of.” I see 孫悟空 and I just roll with it. So if the last episode really lets Pete and Qi Rong go all out, I am not watching some random supernatural fight. I am watching Pete’s inner monkey go up against Qi Rong’s demon presence, and somehow Sky and Nani make that clash ten times more fun for me.
ok but at some point my brain stops treating WU like simple action fantasy and more like the writers broke into a myth closet and started playing dress up. Some scenes feel like someone grabbed pieces of Journey to the West, dipped them in Thai genre vibes, threw in BL tension, and went “good enough, let’s go.” Messy sometimes. Gorgeous sometimes. I kind of love how unapologetic the show is about mixing all of that together.
June 25. Sky’s birthday. Of course I am counting down, what did you expect.
Happy birthday Sky. It is genuinely funny. I am watching Niran wrestle with fate, remembering Saint and Shin on a motorbike, and then I look at the calendar and realize right, this man has an actual birthdate and probably a party somewhere. My fandom brain is in the background stitching drama universes and real life together while I am supposedly just watching a show.
That is probably what I like most about this episode honestly. It does not sit quietly as just “good TV.” Chinese characters on talismans. Temple style nicknames. Myth references hiding inside character design. That familiar motorcycle closeness I already saw in another series. It keeps poking every little nerdy corner of my East Asian media brain and I am not just liking the plot, I am having fun noticing how it plays with my memory and my cultural baggage. Refuses to be simple. Respect, honestly.
I went into ChermChey with my “cultural studies brain” turned on and my “Is this good TV?” brain parked at the door. I’m not here to argue ratings or plot structure. I’m here to see what this show is accidentally teaching me about language, gender, and how BL dresses up the same familiar romance patterns and still gets away with it.
First thing that grabbed me: the bar. Naming the bar Cherm Chey after the Thai phrase เฉิ่มเชย is already a full lecture. You take a word that basically means “old‑fashioned, corny, uncool” and turn it into both the series title and the central location. Suddenly “corny and outdated” is not an insult, it’s a brand. It’s the show looking at you and saying, “Yes, this is peak cliché. You still pressed play, didn’t you?”
Then there’s how the characters talk. Oeng is very clearly a gay man, but he keeps calling himself a “weak little girl,” and he and Intha go all in on “husband” and “wife.” For an American ear that sounds oddly gendered. In a lot of English‑speaking queer spaces, people prefer “husband and husband” or “partner.” Here, the series dives back into the old hetero script on purpose.
BL fandom in East Asia already thinks this way. In Chinese spaces you often see LG and LP: LG is lao gong (老公), literally “husband,” used for the more dominant or protective side of the pairing, or the guy a fan claims as “my husband.” LP is lao po (老婆), literally “wife,” used for the softer, more pampered side, or the character fans treat as “my wife.” It’s not about legal status, it’s about slapping a husband‑and‑wife template onto a BL couple so you can read the dynamic at a glance. ChermChey basically drags that fan logic into diegetic speech.
What makes it funny is the mismatch. Oeng doesn’t really act femme. He’s not doing stereotypically delicate mannerisms. But his language is all “I’m just a little girl,” and at one point he drops the classic Sailor Moon line about punishing you in the name of the moon. Visually you’re watching a pretty solidly masculine guy. Verbally he’s cosplaying a magical girl protagonist. The clash between body and language is where the comedy hits, and it feels very knowingly “I am playing The Ideal BL Bottom today, thank you.”
The show also piles its belief systems on pretty shamelessly. Intha is genuinely temple hopping and devout, but he also believes in fortune‑telling and happily sits down to read horoscope predictions with Oeng. So you get Buddhism, pop astrology, and generic fate talk all pointing to the same conclusion: these two are meant to be. It shifts their love story into a low key fantasy romcom where destiny is less theology and more a running joke between the universe and the audience.
Under all that, they are physically glued together, throwing sexual innuendo around, and Intha is basically using his muscles as a plot device. The actual story is… minimal. I’m not really here for tight plotting anyway. I’m here for the accidental syllabus: one old‑fashioned bar name, one set of LG / LP dynamics promoted to canon dialogue, one magical girl self‑insert, and a whole stack of beliefs quietly insisting that being “corny and outdated” is actually the point.
28 
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2 
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1 
2 
17 
The title is already an argument. Before a single scene plays, it tells you this is going to be a story about people who step so far into a role that they lose track of where the role ends and they begin.
入戲 looks simple on the surface. It means to enter the drama, that moment when an actor stops watching the story from the outside and finally lets himself walk into it. But this adaptation never lets the word stay technical. 入戲 becomes its way of describing people who cross lines they were never meant to cross, then stay on the far side long enough that “acting” no longer feels like an honest word for what they are doing.
The English title sharpens that. Deep In is not enter the drama and leave when the director calls cut. It is sinking, staying under, being held there. Deep in the role. Deep in the story. Deep in someone else’s world. There is something almost airless about the phrase, a buried promise that what you are watching is not just immersion but entanglement, the kind nobody walks away from clean.
The shape of the source novel is what makes that double title feel deliberate. There is the actor line on the outside and the doctor and patient line folded inside the film they are shooting. Zhen Xin and Zhang Zhun are supposed to be professionals. They share a space, study scripts, watch films together, rehearse intimacy because the job asks for it. On paper they are two actors entering a project. In the texture of the show, every step closer reads as another layer of 入戲. They are not only entering the drama they are paid to perform. They are entering each other, mostly without naming it, sometimes without admitting it even to themselves.
Zhen Xin’s name does a lot of quiet work here. 甄心 (Zhēn Xīn) sits right next to 真心 (zhēn xīn), true heart, close enough that you cannot unhear it. Early on he plays like a man standing above the situation. He has status, craft, a cool kind of clarity. He can afford to study Zhang Zhun from a distance, test him, weigh how much effort he is worth. Those first episodes slowly rewrite the name into a question. Will this man ever let his true heart surface, or is all of it controlled performance. By the end of the early run it is hard to keep calling it pretending. The attention he pays Zhang Zhun has stopped being about landing a better take. It has become something closer to actual care, actual investment. The title promised 入戲. His name confirms he has gone past the safe version of it.
Inside the film within the film, 入戲 gets considerably darker. Fang Zhi is a psychologist, and that role arrives with its own architecture of boundaries. He is supposed to hold a space that is structured and ethical and safe, especially for someone like Gao Zhun, whose history is full of trauma and violated consent. In that world the line between doctor and patient is not up for negotiation. So when Fang Zhi starts to forget it, the show refuses to frame it as a minor slip. It makes his choices the pressure point the whole story turns on.
He does not simply fall in love. He lets his professional position bleed into something else, something laced with desire and control and a need to matter to this person in a way that has stopped being therapeutic. A space meant for repair becomes a place where old wounds and new attachments keep overlapping. That is its own kind of 入戲. The doctor enters the patient’s world too far, and instead of holding him at a careful distance, he starts living inside that vulnerability with him. The series does not file this neatly under romance, and it does not file it neatly under abuse either. It leaves you in a more uncomfortable middle, in the overlap, where care and overreach are running at the same time.
That discomfort is where the story turns quietly postmodern. The usual anchors start slipping. The doctor is not a stable figure of authority. The actor is not just a worker executing a script. The pairs that normally keep a narrative legible stop behaving like clean opposites and begin folding into one another: professional against personal, ethical against unethical, performance against reality. Fang Zhi is healer and transgressor at once. Zhen Xin is calculating star and someone who has plainly, genuinely started to care. The film inside the film is both fiction and mirror, and the mirror keeps rearranging the lives of the men holding it up.
Which is what makes Deep In such an exact English name. Everyone here is in too far. The actors are in too far with their roles and with each other. The doctor is in too far with his patient. The boundaries that are supposed to keep people safe come apart: between work and feeling, between ethics and desire, between the story and the life. 入戲 carries the ordinary meaning of stepping into a role. This adaptation reaches for the more unsettling half of it, the part that asks what happens when no one can quite remember the way back out.
Because he feels so little, even the idea that Jay could be Arthur, the man he has been searching for, doesn’t quite register as believable. He can’t bring himself to accept that things might finally be straightforward, or that he could be lucky for once. In his mind, his life has always been like that of a boxing sparring partner, there to quietly absorb one hit after another.
One. From light to shadow: a love that grows in the corners
The beginning is genuinely bright.
The laundry scene kills me. They wring out a sheet together, hang it up, and suddenly there’s a white wall of fabric. They slip behind it and kiss; all we see is shadow. The shot is clean, still, secretly romantic. Love sprouts behind the sheet first, not under the sun.
Then come the notes and the music.
“I want to hear you sing every day.”
“Which note is your favorite?”
“You’re my most beautiful note.”
In the dorm they edge closer during the movie. In the music room they play the organ together. A sheep appears in the notebook, and a song called “Tan Kham Wa Rak.” He isn’t only singing for God anymore; he’s started singing for a person.
But the light gets shoved into shadow fast.
The waterfall trip that felt like freedom gets brushed off as “boring.” The rosary goes missing and turns up on Barth; Kongdech finds it, and suddenly it looks wrong. In the storage room Barth says he’s tired of hiding, a shadow flickers past the door, and they bolt. When someone comes in, they fold into the corner; he clutches the rosary, terror written all over his face.
Same campus, same closeness, but the air shifts from open to “ready to disappear at any moment.”
Two. Water and fire: pushing his head underwater, then burning the memories himself
Water keeps changing shape.
The waterfall is freedom, where the rules don’t quite reach. The laundry is everyday water, carrying his mother’s memory.
After the priest crosses his path in the hallway, he’s in a cold sweat. Then he goes to the big washroom and drives his head under the tap. It’s not washing anymore. It’s punishment: get a grip, you’re not supposed to feel this.
Later, lying in bed after evening study, he remembers Barth’s doodles and notes are still in that notebook, and panic hits. He runs to the office in the dark and digs out every slip of paper, every page.
He takes a lighter to the abandoned pool, the same one that used to be full of water: the place he and Barth once spent a night. Now the empty basin becomes a stage for fire, and he burns the paper one sheet at a time.
Water used to hold them up. Fire eats their words. He thinks burning it severs the cord; I think it tattoos him instead. No matter how he tries to deny it later, he’ll remember standing in that exact spot, trying to end things while the firelight swallowed every trace of “I love you.”
Three. Rosary, notebook, notes: everyday tools of faith touched by love
Small ordinary objects keep getting tangled with love.
The rosary is supposed to be his line to faith, the one around his neck. It ends up on Barth. Kongdech picks it up and says, “For a second I didn’t know who to give it back to.” It’s funny and a little brutal: when one religious object fits on two people, you already know there’s something between them.
The notebook is for homework and theology, and now it’s holding a sheep, a melody, a folded note in the seam. The moment it’s about to be collected for the priest’s comments, the notebook turns into “an intimate file an authority might open.” No wonder he can’t lie still.
The notes start out tucked into his locker, the scripture, the notebook folds, little things like “sing every day” and “most beautiful note.” In the end he gathers them all, drags them to the bottom of the pool, and burns them together.
I love this choice. Love doesn’t only live in kisses and big speeches; it seeps into the rosary, the notebook, the paper, objects that were supposed to belong to faith and routine. He tries to hide the love, and instead he leaves fingerprints on everything.
Four. The gaze and the confession: scared of being seen, brave enough to say it
The whole episode wrestles with being seen.
The sheet-shadow kiss is staged for us, and feels like a hint: in God’s line of sight, love never really hides. Then there are the friends. The missing rosary. The collected notebook. The volunteer scene where he can no longer promise he’ll follow the religious path. When Joe hears “ordained or not, I’ll still come visit you,” his face is pure worry.
The hallway encounter with the priest is even harsher. Nothing explodes, but he’s drenched in sweat, his hand twisting his trousers into a knot. His body gives away the guilt and fear before any words do.
Under that pressure he steps into the confessional and finally says:
“Father, I’ve fallen in love with someone. Even though I know it’s wrong. I tried to stop myself and I couldn’t. I’m furious at myself because I can’t control this feeling. Father, I’m afraid. I’m afraid God will abandon me.”
He lays three things down at once: this is love; he’s been taught it’s wrong; and what terrifies him most is that God might not want him anymore.
The confession isn’t just asking to be forgiven. It’s the first time he lets himself say it inside his faith: I love someone, and it’s tearing me apart.
Five. A straight shot at the breakup: a boy’s question to God
The last conversation is the sharpest cut.
He’s trying to end it. Barth asks, “Have you really never loved me?” He says, “I love you. I love you so much. But what are we supposed to do?”
It’s cruel and honest. He isn’t leaving because he doesn’t love. He loves so much he can’t see any way for that love to survive in this world.
Then Barth says:
“If God teaches us to love, but won’t let us love each other, then what is God even for?”
That’s not calm theology. It’s someone throwing a straight question at the center of his pain. You told me to learn love. I’m loving. You say it can’t be. So what exactly were you teaching me?
I feel split when I hit that line. Part of me thinks he’s incredibly brave, dragging “God” right into the middle of their story. Part of me knows that in real life, people say this and get more silence, more blame, not comfort.
What stays with me: from hiding a love, to putting the whole world on trial for it
These are the Episode 5 details that move me most.
It’s not “two boys have a cute romance.” It’s two boys trying to love inside faith, school rules, and old wounds. For this love he hides, lies, shoves his head under cold water, burns every note in the place they once shared. In the confessional he says: I’ve fallen for someone, I think it’s wrong, I’m scared God doesn’t want me. At the edge of the breakup he says “I love you so much,” and Barth asks, “If that’s how it is, what is a God like that even for?”
What I love about Episode 5 is that it doesn’t keep these questions locked inside them. It says them out loud. It lets the camera sit with them. And when you take all these moments and write them down like this, you’re doing something powerful too: you take a love that spends the whole show hiding in corners, and you walk it out into the light, just long enough for it to be seen properly.
As a first episode, it totally sold me. I’m absolutely tuning in on time every week.
EP2 has me in a chokehold.
I’m watching with subs so I have to actually pay attention to the case details and office politics, but it never feels like a chore. The pacing is tight, the mood is tense without being loud, and the emotional beats land clearly enough that I lean in instead of zoning out.
Honestly relieved to have a Korean BL that looks this sharp again. Stylish, dark without being edgy for its own sake, and actually interested in telling a real story under the fanservice. Into it enough that I’m heading straight into episode 2.
These kids can really act. Ko001’s yelling genuinely shook me. That rain scene, with his voice dropping into that rough, gravelly low register while he yells at Ko002, stayed with me long after it ended. There is something about the way he sounds like he is trying to keep himself together and falling apart at the same time that hits very hard. I honestly did not expect someone as young as Progress to keep getting this much better this fast. At this point, I have no idea where his ceiling is, and that is exciting.
This is actually the first time I have seen three couples confess in the same episode, at the exact same emotional beat, all using these sideways little tactics that somehow feel both indirect and painfully direct. The way it is staged and cut together really floored me. Ko002 gets cornered by Ko001 in the rain until he finally snaps and yells, “I like you.” August accidentally pieces together that Tle is the one who has been leaving the notes, which forces Tle to own up to writing them. And Augar quietly works out what Achi tried to hide with correction fluid, then writes Achi’s earlier line back at him: “If he sinks a three-pointer, I’ll confess to him.”
What I love is that none of these are clean, planned confessions. They are all triggered. Someone is pushed, exposed, or found out. Feelings leak out through pressure points, not perfect timing. It makes the whole sequence feel like three emotional locks snapping open at once.
The director is sharp. Really sharp. Stacking three “break the seal” moments together like that could easily have turned into noise, but instead it feels precise. Each couple has a different emotional color, and somehow they still line up in the same rhythm.
I cannot wait for the next episode. Say what you want about this show, but for me it just keeps one-upping itself week after week.
Some of the visuals in episode 1 are genuinely lovely. Mokudai Kazuto really nails Saeki’s quiet crush on Wataru, the kind you catch in sideways glances. I’d already clocked Oku Tomoya from earlier roles, but his slightly fuller cheeks work so well for Toda Wataru here. He reads like an actual clumsy high schooler instead of a polished drama prince, which I loved.
Episode 1 is pretty solid so far. Bright and summery on the surface, and with “Hotaru” wrapped around it you can already feel where this is headed.
also you are literally about to be in the same room as the source material SOON, do you understand how unfair that is. give Sky and Nani all the energy on our behalf and report back with EVERYTHING. take it all in, you lucky thing 🩷
Anyway. The way this episode starts is so sneaky. A few shots in and my brain is already screaming “Saint and Shin.” That scene with Pete on the big motorcycle and Niran on the back feels like someone took High School Frenemy, turned off the school lights, added demons, and said, “Here, relive all that chemistry but now it is cursed.” I am almost sure I am not the only one who saw that and immediately thought of that other timeline.
Then. Qi Rong.
I finally zoomed in on that little seal and saw the Chinese characters 「奇戎」. That was my oh wait a second moment. Suddenly Li Pou calling him 「戰神爺」 gets a lot more interesting. On the surface it sounds like a proper temple style war god title, like something carved on a shrine. But the way he looks on screen is pure 牛魔王 energy. The show grabbed a piece of Chinese myth, dressed it up in local religious language, and dropped it into this Thai fantasy world just to see how much it would mess with my brain. It worked.
And Pete. This boy has a “six eared macaque” living rent free inside him. There is nothing subtle about that. The story is basically nudging me going “you know exactly who this reminds you of.” I see 孫悟空 and I just roll with it. So if the last episode really lets Pete and Qi Rong go all out, I am not watching some random supernatural fight. I am watching Pete’s inner monkey go up against Qi Rong’s demon presence, and somehow Sky and Nani make that clash ten times more fun for me.
ok but at some point my brain stops treating WU like simple action fantasy and more like the writers broke into a myth closet and started playing dress up. Some scenes feel like someone grabbed pieces of Journey to the West, dipped them in Thai genre vibes, threw in BL tension, and went “good enough, let’s go.” Messy sometimes. Gorgeous sometimes. I kind of love how unapologetic the show is about mixing all of that together.
June 25. Sky’s birthday. Of course I am counting down, what did you expect.
Happy birthday Sky. It is genuinely funny. I am watching Niran wrestle with fate, remembering Saint and Shin on a motorbike, and then I look at the calendar and realize right, this man has an actual birthdate and probably a party somewhere. My fandom brain is in the background stitching drama universes and real life together while I am supposedly just watching a show.
That is probably what I like most about this episode honestly. It does not sit quietly as just “good TV.” Chinese characters on talismans. Temple style nicknames. Myth references hiding inside character design. That familiar motorcycle closeness I already saw in another series. It keeps poking every little nerdy corner of my East Asian media brain and I am not just liking the plot, I am having fun noticing how it plays with my memory and my cultural baggage. Refuses to be simple. Respect, honestly.
First thing that grabbed me: the bar. Naming the bar Cherm Chey after the Thai phrase เฉิ่มเชย is already a full lecture. You take a word that basically means “old‑fashioned, corny, uncool” and turn it into both the series title and the central location. Suddenly “corny and outdated” is not an insult, it’s a brand. It’s the show looking at you and saying, “Yes, this is peak cliché. You still pressed play, didn’t you?”
Then there’s how the characters talk. Oeng is very clearly a gay man, but he keeps calling himself a “weak little girl,” and he and Intha go all in on “husband” and “wife.” For an American ear that sounds oddly gendered. In a lot of English‑speaking queer spaces, people prefer “husband and husband” or “partner.” Here, the series dives back into the old hetero script on purpose.
BL fandom in East Asia already thinks this way. In Chinese spaces you often see LG and LP: LG is lao gong (老公), literally “husband,” used for the more dominant or protective side of the pairing, or the guy a fan claims as “my husband.” LP is lao po (老婆), literally “wife,” used for the softer, more pampered side, or the character fans treat as “my wife.” It’s not about legal status, it’s about slapping a husband‑and‑wife template onto a BL couple so you can read the dynamic at a glance. ChermChey basically drags that fan logic into diegetic speech.
What makes it funny is the mismatch. Oeng doesn’t really act femme. He’s not doing stereotypically delicate mannerisms. But his language is all “I’m just a little girl,” and at one point he drops the classic Sailor Moon line about punishing you in the name of the moon. Visually you’re watching a pretty solidly masculine guy. Verbally he’s cosplaying a magical girl protagonist. The clash between body and language is where the comedy hits, and it feels very knowingly “I am playing The Ideal BL Bottom today, thank you.”
The show also piles its belief systems on pretty shamelessly. Intha is genuinely temple hopping and devout, but he also believes in fortune‑telling and happily sits down to read horoscope predictions with Oeng. So you get Buddhism, pop astrology, and generic fate talk all pointing to the same conclusion: these two are meant to be. It shifts their love story into a low key fantasy romcom where destiny is less theology and more a running joke between the universe and the audience.
Under all that, they are physically glued together, throwing sexual innuendo around, and Intha is basically using his muscles as a plot device. The actual story is… minimal. I’m not really here for tight plotting anyway. I’m here for the accidental syllabus: one old‑fashioned bar name, one set of LG / LP dynamics promoted to canon dialogue, one magical girl self‑insert, and a whole stack of beliefs quietly insisting that being “corny and outdated” is actually the point.