Spectacular series, awfully wrapped up... unless they are messing with us.

Please, someone helps me out here to understand what the fck of a finale I have just watched!

What the hell happened? I mean, is this the finale for real? 
Cos honestly, it doesn't make any sense: you, screenwriter/s, create a gay series just to end up suggesting that it's better to nip things in the bud and put distance in order to forget that you like your own genre friend?! OMG! 
This ending could be easily the most anti-LGBT thing I have ever seen in my whole life! 
Not even the Pope himself or Mohammed could think of such a strategy of reverse psychology, Wow! LOL
Basically, you spent 12 episodes in view of teaching how to give up the one you love and how to renounce and avoid temptations, trying to correct yourself like if it were a possible choice for a gay person?! Are you fking kiddin' me?! 
Except for the very end where you give us the ridiculous sop of "Pass the next exam"/"Okay" thing?! Whaaaaaaat?

So, now: I get it all wrong, right? RIGHT? Tell me I got it completely wrong, because unfortunately that is the message I received from the finale of the series and right now I am astonished! I cannot believe what I have just seen, I must be drunk or stoned without even knowing.

Though, if I got it wrong as I hope, then my production's friends, you really don't know how to create, write and film a season finale, and I am talking about the presentation and the form of the narrative development, not about the content of the plot. So again, the fault is yours. LOL
Because what the hell happened to the male teacher couple?!
We got a confession (as if it were ever needed, I mean, your mate has just kissed you on your mouth 2 days before and you, for real, ask him now if he does like the female teacher? How stupid and slow you must be! What did you need? Two meters of his tongue in your throat to get the message? I am shouting this to the screenwriter, of course).
And then nothing else?!  SERIOUSLY?!  It is just finished this way! How is that even possible?

What happened to the boys' parents? What about the Granpa?
And also... what is the use of failing the exam for splitting up if you are still in the same freaking room as him?! Didn't it occur to the writers to let the audience know that maybe Sheng Wang was about to go back home, for example?! You know, just for adding a little bit of logical sense to this foolish end!

We are not talking here about some sort of open ending, this is not, cos there is no end of any kind here! Not a chance.
This finale just cuts abruptly a storyline and it is not for debate: if you stop the story-telling at its peak, on its climax, you just kill the story itself, and you can't even call this a cliffhanger, cos generally in this industry you get a cliffhanger AFTER the main narrative arch is concluded, for introducing a new plot that is super interesting and breathtaking; or you can have nice cliffhangers between episodes, for instance. But that, again, is not the case here! 
So, WHAT IS WRONG WITH THIS PRODUCTION?!
DiD YOU GET BORED TO FILM ALL OF A SUDDEN? LOL

UNLESS —and here is where I have been waiting for you since the start— you did all of that cos you guys had already signed this project for 2 or 3 seasons.
If that is the case, then stop being ridiculous and just announce it to the desperate public. Anyway, there you should have put well-designed and smart cliffhangers instead of cuts and walls all over the place. You make yourself clear through your filming that a second season will follow.

But, otherwise, IF you are NOT SURE you can pull it through, if you just casually took the shot without having a clue if the series would get a renewal for a second season, then shame on you! We have seen this attitude already countless times in old western TV series and in current Japanese anime, so... WTF!
Therefore this finale is simply bad from a film technical standpoint: awful structure, absurd chapters division for the lack of time balance (you were on drugs while creating the storyboard) and in conclusion, apart from the main leads, all the other characters simply disappear from the end of the story and basically they can go suck it; I dunno what else I may add! 
Pros should never work this way; they should always have a decent respect for the audience, if not, make ourselves a favor: keep the half story for yourself if you are not able to tell one entirely and let others have the job done. Thank You.

I am pissed off as hell, cos I give a super vote to this fantastic series, one of the best gay series on TV of the last 30 years worldwide, both Asian and western TVs; I am dead serious.
It is marvelous: realistic, believable, sensitive and deep, amusing and poor of clichè. All the characters are very well characterized and defined, 3D persons; all the actors, and i mean it, are great: the entire cast plays spontaneously, never overacting.
The dialogues between Little Chili and Gao Tian Yang are superbly written and their back-and-forth exchanges are amazingly performed by the actors. Andy Chen really did a splendid performance throughout the whole series: his naturalness in playing that role makes me think of him as any of my old classmates still beside me.
Beautiful directing, nice editing, maybe not original or innovating but still very good, cos the pace of narration is amazing: great rhythm, peaks and pauses that create a beautiful dynamic in the story-telling speed, with the result of having you addicted, greedy and eager for every tiny detail in every episode.
The attunement and the chemistry between the leads are really good, so much that they totally remind you of "Your name engraved herein" (Taiwanese cinema docet indeed) with several contact points. The building up of their bond and their attachment is really well thought out; it follows natural and realistic steps, giving this way real substance to their story.

In short, literally everything was great and stunning... until... the finale arrived... my goodness...
It is just neither a proper series finale nor a season finale. No matter how you put it, cinematically speaking, it just sucks. 
If someone had told me yesterday, I would never believe that I would have managed to find a worse TV-show finale than the "Game of Thrones" one! LOL

Damn you, TV's contracts, you create prostitutes amongst authors... sigh.

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Poetry lost in translation

It certainly needs a better, brand new English translation to allow non-Korean speakers to re-translate it from English into their own languages. I can't believe the current translation is a faithful one, because that means the original script wouldn't make much sense and logic. In English, the back-and-forth dialogues show too much nonsense. IMHO, it is unlikely that director and screenwriter Lee Son Eum would have liked it this way, not a chance... unless there is still too much inexperience, naivety or lack of skills, but I wanna hope not.
Seriously, whoever produced this mini-series needs a new translator, I beg of you! Otherwise, you are missing on a good distribution and reaching the real intended target.

Although the poverty of lines is clearly on purpose, to be honest and objective, setting aside the bad
translation, here and there there are indeed some tiny holes in the script, to the extent that you might feel confused, for example, the staging (the mise en scène) lacks something.
Another fault I perceived is the editing, which is not very clear and, again, a bit confusing: the viewer fights to get the moment in which a particular event is taking place and the general timeline of the events. When you miss that, you kinda fail to grasp the story that wants to be told, not so good, is it? We are not in Christopher Nolan's Inception, right?
Such a shame, because, otherwise, it would be one of the best korean BL (finally NOT-BL!) series I have ever watched!

That said, I loved it!

Minimalist, hermetic, realistic, mature, intense, absolutely original and out of the chorus!
Zero clichè, zero cheap and cheesy scenes, no more cringe and unrealistic stuff that wants to trigger viewers' emotions but looks ridiculous rather than romantic.
You can definitely see a production trying to pursue its artistic style instead of luring the audience with fan service gifts or marketing expectations. BRAVI!

And so, we have fine characters, both main and supporters: real people, full of flaws, sinners but not monsters, often selfish, childish and opportunist, but also caring and capable of self-denial, sacrifice, devotion. And it concerns both sons and parents. We are finally out of stereotypical gay characters, we just watch true boys with their friends and families.

Yoon Dae's devotion and desperate love request after a life of abuse are poignant, while his perseverance in making his voice heard is admirable. He seems to be a slacker, taking advantage of other people's kindness, but deep down he is also struggling to regain a sense of belonging. He screams that he wants to love and be loved, he still believes, even throwing a tantrum, but then he endures and waits.
His sweetness in stealing kisses from Soo Hyuk shows us his most vulnerable side, almost pitiful: "Leave me tomorrow, but tonight, please, just pretend and let me have one last gift: let the warmth of your lips be my last memory of you".
There is such a sorrow in this behavior that your heart is tightened, you feel his resignation in accepting that he must live alone, but at the same time your heart is filled with love by the force of his desire. So passionate, so beautiful.

You can feel the same from Soo Hyuk: watching him carrying alone the burden of his family's failures is excruciating and yet his determination to survive and not to give up, despite fatigue and sacrifice, shows strength and courage. He has always behaved as a trustworthy adult without being able though to express his feelings and desires, to the point where he is no longer capable of dreaming for a better future. We can sense he feels guilty about abandoning Yoon Dae years before; we feel his sense of duty and how much he wants to make it up to Yoon Dae. We can also guess he has always had feelings for Yoon Dae, conflicted intense feelings that frighten him. He is exhausted from being the reliable guy, always taking care of others, he can't bear it anymore. Now he needs help, someone to rely on, someone who takes care of him; he would need Yoon Dae to man up and become the adult and so he is tempted to run away again, to put distance between the two of them.
But then he stops and waits.
In different forms, they’re both fighters.

In the series there are incredible gloomy atmospheres that deliver the characters' feelings and moods, full of pain and sadness, filled with desire or rage too often suppressed. That kind of desire and anger daring to explode and surface only when there is an intimacy you finally succeeded in building with another human being you feel connected to.
That is why they easily end up hurting each other.
You can spot the exclusivity of their relationship when they confront themselves and show their true selves only to each other.

Nice choice in picking closed and confined spaces, soft lights and dull colors to portray not only the sense of no-way-out of the two leads but also the attachment, their bond and their intimacy, whispered, in total contraddiction with outdoor or open spaces, noisy and always full of light, where the both of them face their own, somehow abusing, parents. The open place, the rest of the world, is dangerous. The closed one, the two of them, is the safe zone, indeed the shelter; no more the cage that previously locked them up and isolated them. Loneliness creates anxiety though, so Yoon Dae refuses or struggles to live that solitude in places he wants to call home, places he will eventually realize he wants to live with Soo Hyuk.

Beautiful photography, pure and clean use of the film camera, nice close-up shots: essential, rough, but also touching and emotional. Good acting performances.

The beauty of this work lies in the unsaid, the unspoken, the untold. You get its poetry through the lack of explicit scenes and lines, which creates a very strong tension in the viewers who crave developments in the plot and focus on every detail in order to follow the story. This leads them to imagine the unseen, to create by themselves the love story line that eventually, despite everything, brings to a very happy ending. The light at the end of the tunnel.
I found this to be a very powerful narrative style.

The series starts with "I reject and resent you but I love you, I want you and chase you" on one character, while the other goes with "I care about you, I help you, I love you but I have to run away from you and everyone else".
Immaturity and emotional openness versus maturity and emotional block. Two mates under the relentless effect of attractive and repulsive forces, even after a long time.
And yet, despite the absence of words, the protagonists' mutual tenderness and love are revealed by their taking care of each other’s shoes, which symbolizes so much: I cherish and keep my love for you for years only to myself, because I am too scared to believe in love. Because I don't dare to show you anything, because I can't deal with you and put myself on the line, because I can't be brave enough to hope for anything... until I do, we both do.
Wonderful, disruptive, romantic message.

However, the ultimate content I found is: "We can support and help each other, but that doesn't mean we genuinely love each other or that we are ready to commit, so what's the difference between LOVE and NEED?
I must test myself, find my own path, complete my coming of age and understand that I don't love you because I need you, but I do need you because I love you.
So, once we get this naked truth, do we really need to take our separate ways in order to love each other dearly?
Can't we just simply have dinner together?"
And taking a leap of faith, while resolving yourself, your answer becomes: "Yes, please, do wait for me, let's have dinner together, shall we?".
Home.

The OST is amazing, no kitsch melodies and rhymes: strong opening and ending songs. On the various, all the instrumental themes edited are wisely dosed and therefore suggestive, powerful and
impressive. It felt like glimpsing a mix of familiar sounds from Coldplay, Radiohead and David Bowie.

In the end, when Yoon Dae says to Soo Hyuk - "Don't call me. You seldom call my name." - tell me, please, who didn't suddenly think they were somehow quoting "Call me by your name"? I certainly did. ;)

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