A thorough disappointment

KinnPorsche the Series actually said bring sexy back. Sexy being Non Consensual drugged sex and varying forms of unacknowledged sexual assault between a mafia boss and a trauma-bonded man he rapes after kidnapping and making an offer he can’t refuse on pain of harm to his family.

This story depicts a full on masc4masc agenda, prioritising of white, cis, male, western, English speaking fan aesthetics and preferences, while sidelining femme characters who would normally be the stars in an Asian BL, in favour of cis men who would undoubtedly screen out most of the mlm who paid good money to support KPTS with: “No [Redacted], No [Redacted], No [Redacted].

Clearly the studio/crew comprised mainly of cis gay men wants to appeal to more men - a worthy goal, and men want to see lots of casual sex, but the legacy of Kinn Porsche’s pornificaction of live action BL could very well mean very little attention will be paid by investors to innovative, high quality BL storytelling that treats complex themes with even the minimum care and attention they deserve, for some time to come. “Fetishizing fujoshis” will still somehow get the blame for this but I can assure you women fans of BL did not ask for this.

Everything that women, queer or not, and femmes ran away from mainstream gay media to escape was forced back down their throats for 14 excruciating and traumatic weeks with the blanket hyper masculine, Stepford wife agenda of this series.

There is a bigger issue with what happens to art when big capital gets involved and the way it tends to reenforce the status quo but that’s a separate discussion. It is the production company first and foremost that is guilty of professional malpractice and it is disturbing but inevitable that the unethical practices behind the scenes - sexual harassment, homophobia and misogynistic behaviour, embarrassing scandals and infighting, with no consequences, are exactly the same ones reflected in how the story is conveyed onscreen. They are the same people after all; the art can never be better than the artist.

The basic problem with this Anti-BL is that the writing, mediocre as it was, is consistently from the perspective of the rapists/predators and the writers repeatedly insert textual ambiguity that invites the viewer to empathise with the power-holders rather than the victims of abuse which is the antithesis of romance BL. Spoiler Alert: This profound power imbalance is never eroded throughout 14 episodes.

In both sets of rape scenes the power-holder has emotional depth, complicated backstory and whimsical feelings of guilt along with innocence behind his actions while the victim has a disproportionate amount of motivation, agency and accountability attributed to him for the sexual assaults he endures - very much upholding a regressive status quo that already affects queer men severely.

Every flaw in this blatantly homonormative series is actually intentional and that’s what makes it so alarming. Both the production on screen and the way the studio treats its actors and fans, especially the psychological operations delivered through marketing, is seriously unethical especially from a well capitalised studio that has so many eyes globally on its first so-called BL, and its audience was so large it could end up giving the genre in Thailand a name that will be hard to recover from, but at the same time be so commercially sucessful judging by views, that investment for more BoC content could crowd out investment for more high quality productions such as from Nadao which are starved for investment while producing much higher quality series which are actually BLs. What’s the central conflict? We still have no idea despite the new characters and arcs forced into the final minutes of the final episode, not to conclude the story but to open the door to more exploitative money-making for a threatened season 2.

Even in the way writers/directors treated the first rape scene the focus was more on diminishing KP fan’s dislike of Kinn so he could be effortlessly “redeemed” enough for fan service to be lucrative, and less on portraying bad men doing bad things, which is why they couldn’t commit to delivering a rape scene as what it wasn’t- a rape scene, as they ought.

Writers didn’t have the skill to write a compelling redemption arc so they made the bad men “less bad” in the first place; according to the writers Porsche and Pete “welcomed their rapes” as well as their emotional and abuse. Logics of good storytelling were abandoned to prioritise commercial marketability of the actors.

Furthermore KP is fujoshi bait, what you get when your intention is to make toys for boys but you need the superior numbers, social media engagement and higher propensity to spend on their faves that only women bring to fandom but men do not. Hence the upside down, inappropriate and superficial application of some BL tropes which shows the team failed to do its research into the work BL tropes are meant to be doing. Why try to enter the BL industry if you have this level of contempt for its defining features of its fans?

Targeting women fans shows at least they understand the business of BL even if not the substance of the content. Because commercial viability of the ships was always more important that telling a good story in BoC decision making, is for eg why fans ended up in a virtual civil war over the fact that CPs that were given elaborate focus in the marketing promos ended up having little (Vegas/Pete) or no story arc whatsoever (Time/Tay) in the actual script.

Instead of a bad-faith production that looked like it was comprised of scraps off the cutting room floor, Kinn Porsche The Series could’ve hired quality screenwriters to create something awesome and chose not to but to spend instead on cynical marketing tactics and over-saturated colour grading. If an exploitative, mediocre drama with stressful and exasperating mess in front and behind the camera, topped off with pointless sex scenes that are decidedly Not sexy is what you’re looking for, then this series is for you.

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