Charming and well-written

I loved this series, mainly becaus of the stellar main pair of Tinn and Gun, played by Gemini Norawit and Fouth Nattawat to perfection as teens experiencing first love.

The side characters are all well-written and acted, especially Tinn's mother, who is the school principal, and everyone has to love Mark Pakin as Tinn's best friend Tiw.

The story is wholly unoriginal, but it's the best realization of this type of plot.

The actors also sing all the music, which is always a plus., with Ford Arun being the standout, although Fourth & Gemini both have lovely voices too.

This is not a world where homophobia doesn't exist (although it only barely exists), and issues like parental concern over the future happiness of their gay children, or whether or not they did anything wrong, were all realistic and sensitively handled.

What prevented this from entering the top rank of BLs, however, is that although this contained one of the most breathtaking scenes in all of BL - the dance - you'll know it when you see it, and the progression of Tinn and Gun's relationship was magical, it peaked early and stagnated, leaving the second half at a lower energy level and at times quite dull. I don't need kissing in a high school story, but I know that I do not want an endless string of kiss fake-outs, which is cheap and started to feel homophobic.

The central dramatic conflict, that the music club's rules forbid Gun to date before a competition at the end of the year is contrived and the path to the context uninteresting, and the overreaction to a setback for the band was one of the only sour notes that felt out of character and lacked the authenticity of the rest of the series.

Fourth is so cute that there were a couple of time I cried a little just looking at him - that outfit at the prom was fatal. I'm really looking forward to seeing more of him and Gemini - they are both highly talented, and easily hold their own with more experienced actors here and even in Midnight Chicken.

I would rate the first four eps a 15/10, then declining to around a 7, hence the 8.5. The first few episodes were so good I thought this would displace all others and become my favorite of all time - but unfortunately it deflated a bit as it progressed. Still, I wouldn't hesistate to recommend this to anyone and everyone.

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This is a trainwreck.

I keep seeing the phrase "there's zero toxicity!" Sure, if you don't think kidnapping and torturing your love interest counts as toxicity, or infantilizing him or discussing him with his father without his knowledge, or being overarchingly controlling, or being enraged with jealousy everytime your boyfriend talks to another person. Question - toxic or not toxic: "I want to lock you up, preventing you from seeing anyone" and "there's a demon in my heart that could harm you at any time." Was I the only one shouting "Run, Fiat! Run!"

It's fine to have a D/s couple, but then you need to say it's a D/s couple and you need to see the couple agree to it. Otherwise, it looks like a psycopath and someone with Stockholm syndrome. Here Mame tried to have it both ways, and the result is not successful.

First and Ja have almost no physical chemistry at all. They have some cuddling chemistry, but that's about it. The actors are so obviously uncomfortable in the love scenes that it makes me squirm. There's always at least a foot of space between their bodies, which is quite an achievement in a sex scene. Leo always looks like he's planking over Fiat instead of f#@$ing him. And their love scenes are all exactly the same. You can count on several things: Leo will grab one or both of Fiat's hands and pin them by his head. His necklace will fall into Fiat's mouth and they'll kiss anyway, despite how that would feel on your teeth. I cringe just thinking about it. Also, metal doesn't taste good. That's why we don't eat it. And the planking.

There is no plot. I mean zero plot. Not even a teeny bit. Every week there's some sort of crisis manufactured that depends on an implausible failure of communication that will inevitably make Fiat cry, in exactly the same way he's cried in all the previous episodes, to the point that I wonder if they just shot it once and replay it every time anything at all happens, because anything at all will made him cry. Like sobbing, not adult crying. Then the crisis will be resolved with a handwave off-screen, but will be given in flashback later.

There's an ep where someone withholds from Leo info on a cartoonishly evil villain's plot to hurt Fiat unless he kisses her. So, does Leo discuss this with Fiat and come up with a course of action, or does he just tell Fiat to be on his guard (Fiat says OK and has no further questions, and Leo offers no context for what one might presume is a somewhat unusual thing to say) and kiss the girl? And if you were a betting person, what are the chances that Fiat will just happen to be on hand to witness something that took one second? This is the quality of the writing. It's so bad I sit staring with my mouth open, even though my expectations weren't really very high.

Fiat is a star athlete, and captain of the basketball team, yet he can't descend three stairs (to be fair, there might have been four stairs) without tripping, he can't tie his shoes without Leo, if he's been sobbing, which is 90% of the time, he has to be carried to bed by Leo, and he can't talk to his insane escaped-from-the-asylum mother without Leo's supervision. Leo doesn't even let Fiat battle his own evil twin by himself. (That last was made up, but if it happened it would surprise no one.) What happened to his kick-ass bad-boy character? I have a theory: In TT2, Fiat was pursuing Type, who is an uke, so he could be more aggressive and manly. Now he's with Leo, who's a huge seme Dom, so Fiat has been transmuted into the Über-uke - the most useless and fragile person ever to exist in a BL.

On to the positives: The secondary couple is so well-written that I suspect Mame has an assistant that wrote their story while her boss was off having virgin cat lady D/s fantasies about Ja, because it's really cute and healthy. Leon is aggressive, but always respectful and gentlemanly. I've seen people accuse him of being a rapey stalker, but he asked for permission to pursue Pob which Pob granted. At one point, he starts to lean in for a kiss, immediately and correctly reads Pob's body language, and aborts & apologizes for his behavior. Smart is not the world's best actor, but he's committed to the role, he's very charming, and he has a shockingly beautiful body which I wasn't expecting to see and was unprepared for. And a sweet smile, and he's not afraid of playing intimacy with another man - you really feel Leon's attraction for Pob, both physically and as a person. It's really sweet and cute.

What's more, although there's still a seme/uke dynamic at play, because Mame is incapable of imagining anything else, it's not typical Mame - Leon (the seme) is younger (although still taller, a barrier that will likely never be breached), and Pob is emotionally more mature and stronger, and is always in control, which I like - he's even the only person who will stand up to Leo & Leon's mother. He wants Leon, but he plays it cool and makes very sure Leon is serious before he's willing to let it happen. And when he's sure, he LETS IT HAPPEN, no "I'm a 19th c. 12-year old virgin, you can kiss me on the cheek once per week."

EDIT: The secondary couple are well-written from Ep 1-11. Ep 12 will make you want to go burn something down. Like Mame's house. But if you do, try to let all the cats out first. Also, have you ever tried to travel to a third-world country with a week's notice? Neither has Mame. Clearly.

I really can't recommend this. If you like the main couple and are liking the series, that feeling is not going to survive Ep 11 and you'll feel you wasted your time. I'd wait for a Leon/Pob cut and watch that.

1 for the writing. It's bad. 8 for Leon/Pob in Ep 1-11, negative 20,000 for Fiat/Leo, so I was generous and gave it a 1. Although I should subtract a point for the Leon/Pob ending, but nobody promised us a fairytale. Except they did because this was marketed as a BL. But there's nothing lower than a 1. So pretend it's a zero.
6 for the acting. If feels worse than a 6, but the material the boys had to work with was so inferior that I felt I should give them the benefit of the doubt.
5 for the music. I don't really notice it, so it's not great and not bad, and kudos for not having too many flashback scenes to sappy and overpowering ballads.
3 rewatch value. You'd have to hold a gun to my head to make me watch this again, but I will probably watch the naked Leon scene several hundred more times, so a 3. (Seriously, I would watch a Leon/Pob cut of ep 1-11, or maybe even FF through the series for their scenes).
4 overall. Probably an 8 for Leon/Pob (ep 1-11, pretending 12 didn't happen), but unfortunately they're not in it very much.

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Is everone watching the same show I'm watching?

How does anyone find this funny? The level of homophobia and misogyny is unacceptable. In the first episode, feminity in gay men is equated with predatory behavior, and the second episode involves a brothel and one character bullying another into having sex against his will.

This is terrible! Not in terms of production values or acting - it's solid there. But the writing is so backward, unfunny, and offensive that I'm truly shocked anyone likes it.

And the evil ex-GF trope again? Can we move past this?

It's a shame - I love everyone in the cast, and I was excited to see Pod in a lead role. Ep 3 was better and funny, but it's hard to get past the previous 2 episodes But even in 3, you have a gay couple paying a call-girl to pose as their romantic interest because they're afraid of Ton. What kind of message is THAT?

And the lack of originality... yikes:

Trip-and-fall-on-each-other-and-stare-at-each-other-with-faces-too-close-together routine? Check.
Engineers? Check.
Pathetic ladyboy? Check.
Silly fujoshi? Check.

One thing it does have going for it is Pod (Ton) is shirtless all the time (or wearing a skin-tight compression tank top which is pretty much the same thing) and I'm shallow.

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It was so-so, except it had Force in it which is better than so-so.

This was much better than the disastrous Enchante, but it's still subpar in all but one regard which I'll return to.

The first half or so of the series was quite good - the characters were interesting, complex, and consistent, and there were several promising plot threads set up...

... all of which were left totally unresolved. Not one single plot point went anywhere. Tian's death, Thoop's conviction, Gun's problems with Time, none of it. Time never even showed up in the story again after the first few episodes, which is a pity because Drake was rather good in a darker role. Even Gun's mother instantly dropped her resistance for no apparent reason.

Instead, the story, such as it was, devolved into the usual GMM ridiculous and implausible drama, wherin Cher's best friend gives Cher completely, astonishingly stupid advice and Cher inexplicably follows it, even thought it's wildly out of his character.

Then the writers did the laziest thing imaginable and gave us a one-year time skip. If someone left you without explanation and then showed up a year later and got on his knee and asked you to be his boyfriend would you a) be overjoyed and immediately accept, or b) Tell him to go jump off a cliff? Can you imagine the emotional suffering and grieving Gun must have gone through? No normal human being would be OK with that. Think about how long a year is and how much changes in that time. Force would have to move on, probably need counseling, and would have had his trust shattered. For years after he'd had PTSD and fear Cher had left him if he was ever late or his phone battery died.

On the positive side, Force is so hot that it hurts a little to look at him. Besides being beautiful, with ridiculous eyelashes and a sexy voice, he has possibly the best body of any BL actor. He does a great job as Gun, playing him consistently and making him enthralling. He plays a quiet and introverted person, and yet he outshines the bubbly Cher by a mile. Book is not bad by any means, but his acting doesn't have a lot of depth. He can be cute and quirky quite well, but I never believed he had romantic feelings for Gun. Whenever they were touching, Book was always leaning away, as if a bit repelled by the proximity. Compare that to Fourth & Gemini in My School President where there's almost no actual sexual intimacy but they portrayed people totally into each other just by looks, leaning into each other, and touching each other almost illicitly. It's really not that hard. To be fair, that might be the directing - it's a well-worn trope that the uke only reluctantly gives in to the unnatural lusts of the seme in exchange for being taken care of.

Maybe being friends in real life is a negative - if you grew up with someone, it would have that sibling-esque quality that makes the thought of being with them kind of icky.

Anyway, Force has so much charisma and is so compelling that he really should be in something much better than this series - if he were paired with someone as good as he is it would be explosive. Imagine Force and Fourth, or Force and Gawin (actually, that might be TOO hot and kill off the audience).

This series was a bit of a guilty pleasure, just because I couldn't get enough of Force, and Book was cute. But it's not good, and it was carried solely by one person.

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This was something special - no girlfriend in the way (little sister seriously in the way, but hilariously and cute), just boys in love. The writing was excellent, the acting was superb, and Fandy Fan just plain hot anf gorgeous. If you like Timmy Xu, you'll like this guy.

I'm not sure why Asian series all have to have sappy easy listening soundtracks - does anyone actually voluntarily listen to music like that? I'd rather have Classical Chinese opera than this dreck. Fortunately it's only mildly annoying because the story and characters were so engrossing.

I wish it had maybe two more episodes to have a smoother transition for Xia Yu Hao from bad boy to sweet and sensitive - it was a little too quick. It would have been better if it had taken longer for Qiu Zi Xuan to make all the discoveries that uncovered what kind of person Yu Hao is. But for four hours, it was superbly written, a tight narrative without a lot of extraneous activity or repetition.

You won't be sorry you watched this.

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Largely tedious with lazy writing

I'll start with negatives and end on positives.

This is poorly written. There are way too many extraneous scenes and endless blocks of dialog that accomplish nothing. If a scene doesn't advance the plot or develop a character, it should be cut. If a scene repeats the same idea over and over, it should be edited down. For example, in the last episode Lom is flirty with Nuea, Nuea rejects him with a comment like "you're getting sneaky". But they did it three times in one (loonnnnnggg) scene. The dialog in general is weak and repetitive, and too much of it is pointless.

The entire plot rests on a completely ridiculous understanding that is so simple to clear up that you want to light things on fire by Ep 5. Then when it's finally cleared up, the main character behaves like it's not cleared up for no apparent reason. It just makes no sense.

The directing is lackluster with a lot of scenes lacking the energy they should have, both comedic and dramatic, although there were some good moments. It also needed a much more disciplined editor.

The acting is just OK. Sunny does a solid job with an uninteresting character, and Pak is about equal playing an even less interesting character. Nuea would have made a good side character, but I just don't think Pak has the charisma for a leading role. He does have intensity, and I can see him being excellent in a villain role. The chemistry was so-so. The actors weren't afraid of inimacy, but their love scenes still had that distance between their bodies that makes most BL sex scenes weird.

A lot of people were greatly put off by Lom & Yiwa's plan, but it's easy to object if you haven't lived in a conservative and unaccepting society with huge familial and social pressures crushing you. What they did made perfect sense, and everyone involved knew the score and consented to it, so why all the judgment? If you're gay a great portion of your life is keeping things secret to avoid minor inconveniences like getting fired, beaten to death, or disowned by your family. There are safe spaces, like your friends, and there are places where you hide who you are, or at least don't volunteer it. People at work mention their wives and children all the time - I can't do that, because even if 90% of people are OK with gay, 10% is still enough to ruin you.

There are some strong points, too. The lakorn mothers were hysterical and the editing around them was brilliant, like the ominous music whenever they appeared. Their fight scene at the wedding was funny, although like so much of this series, it went on too long.

Whoever was in charge of wardrobe should be given a raise, because it was all perfect. Both Lom and Nuea have a personal style and their outfits were beautiful.

The camerawork was good and dynamic - the visuals were beautiful and helped make the series bearable.

Sunny (Lom) has his shirt of a LOT, and has clearly been hitting the gym hard, and that never got tiresome.

I wouldn't recommend either watching this or not watching it. If you enjoy a pile of fluff and are not bothered by ridiculous and frustrating plots, you'll enjoy it. I'm not one of those people, but I still watched it to the end for the positives I mentioned above.

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Fatally Dull

I have to be honest, this is one of the worst BLs I've ever seen. It's not offensively bad, it's just relenetlessly dull and bloodless. I don't want to waste your time with too much detail, so bullet points:

- The story was a good idea, but it was just a setting and did nothing to explore behind the scenes of the BL genre, at least not in any realistic and meaningful way. That would be OK, if not for:
- The lack of chemistry between the leads. I'm not sure if that's the actors' fault - the script was weak and the directing especially bad. That's the first time I've gotten bored and ff a love scene.
- The acting is lackluster. It's not embarassingly bad, it's just lifeless. I've seen Gameplay and Best in other things and they were both really good. But all the positioning was so awkward and unnatural - again, I think the directing.
- The editing is rushed, but I understand the production was such a wreck that the actors had to do a lot of the editing, so kudos for that, but it didn't really save the drama. Or I should say "drama', because:
- I get product placement, but this whole series was just a vehicle for marketing supermarket products like makeup and cheap icecream.
- The character of Penelope is truly awful. She spends the whole series sexually harassing the acting coach - relentlessly and without mercy, to the point I would have taken legal action in his place. It was very uncomfortable and yet another miserable portrayal of a trans character as a ridiculous and pathetic man-starved predator.

I can't recommend this, even for Gameplay fans. I came out of this wondering if he was as good as a thought he was, and he's always been one of my favorite actors.

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Beautiful Story and Beautifully Shot

First, this is not for everyone. If you're expecting a BL, you can stop expecting a BL - it's not one. There is an LGBT aspect of the story, and the male gaze is present as Atom wears very little thorughout which is a goldmine for shallow people like me, and when he is dressed up, he looks amazing.

Reading the comments section, there is a bit of overstatement of the theatricality of the series. It is intentionally play-like, but the purely visual elements are of equal importance to the dialogue, and I think that because this was deceptively marketed a BL, the audience was looking for BL and not seeing what was really there, and you can't blame the audience for that.

If you approach this as a straightforward story, you may hate it - it's an allegory, so it's important to think about what everyting symbolizes and what is metaphor, and what the message is.

There are many related themes, a couple of the more surfacy ones being the futility of second-guessing past decisions - and the utility of atonement in order to move on.

The structure of the story has Sunshine given the power to totally erase a person from the universe each night for 7 Days before Valentine('s - I wish these productions could get the grammar of the title correct), and the correct decision will bring love back to him. Each erasure has a lessson, but this causes the biggest problem with the series and what I think is the main reason so many people disliked it and/or dropped it:

it's too long, One of the erasures is a self-indulgent political statement by the writer, which didn't belong in here. What would have been more meaningful and universal would have been to erase the Conservative, ending up in a Stalinist far-left conformity, as without balance even the side you're on can become descend into oppression.

Another of the erasures just makes Sunshine evil and malicious and should not have been included, Some of his decisions are bad, but viewed through the lens of his heartbreak is understandable, but this one isn't - it's just awful of him.

The acting in this is fantastic - the series rests firmly on Atom's shoulders, and he carries it. His heartbreak is heartbreaking, his smile is even worse (so beautiful it hurts), and there's a scene with him on stage that's worth it in itself. Jet is good too, but he has a more limited range and I don't think he quite kept up with Atom. The small parts are all very well acted, even "annoying stock characters" that made them all compelling, like Jared the Flower Guy. who could have just been irritating, but it's hard not to fall in love with him.

I loved this series, but I did feel it bogged down in the middle. If you can put up with that, the end is worth it. But again, this is not a BL, so don't watch it expecting one.

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Surprising - LGBTQ+ rather than BL, but very good.

BL audiences probably won't like this too much - but it's such a refreshing change from the formula. Usually BL characters behave like Jane Austin characters instead of actual people - but here we have what feel like real people. The story doesn't shy away from the superficiality in gay life, or how stupid we are when young, and it touches on the nature of love and the different kinds there are.

I think this could have been more special if the position of Rich and his son were reversed - the way it ended up leaned perhaps too heavily on superficiality.

The acting was pretty good - there were a couple of scenes that might have been too ambitious, but kudos for stretching limits. The directing is excellent, as is the cinematography.

It could have used one more episode so that the wrap-up was a bit more full, but it was well-written enough to work at the given length - the final conversation between Richard and Tupe was a highlight.

The music is good, but maybe it could have used a bit more so that the theme song got a chance to rest. There are several things that one would want to rewatch, especially in the director's cut.

I'm so sorry about the loss of the director - it will be hard to find someone of that caliber for S2.

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Great fluff, but forgetable.

This is not a bad series. But I also don't feel it's as good as most other people do. I would recommend it, but here's my honest review:

The first half of this is spectacular - it roughly follows Romeo & Juliet, so it's hard to go wrong. The director does a fantastic job of ratcheting up the dramatic tension until the end of Ep 5. But then nothing happens. The major conflict with Pran's best friend Wai just evaporates without real resolution due to an external circumstance - there's no conversation about what happened - one moment he's homicidal, the next he's totally OK with everything.

The central conflict between the families also never goes anywhere - there's a brief reveal of the origin of the conflict, and then it's never addressed again - it just goes away... after a time jump.

Speaking of which, time jumps are lazy. The director opted, instead of confrontation and resolution of the central conflict, to just leaping over it. That makes it incomprehensible why they would endure the enormous sacrifice of keeping their relationship secret for five years.

I love that we got to see the main couple interacting as a couple throughout most of the series rather than a hug in the last 10 seconds of the series, but the entire second half of the series is basically just cute moments between them, with no further development of their relationship from the climax on the rooftop in Ep 5, and so it gets repetitive and dull - I've never before in my life ff'd though romantic scenes in BLs, but I was just bored and in the later episodes, relied on 2x to get through them. They seem more like friends with benefits than a real couple. In the last ep, they interact exactly like they did at the beginning - not like people who have been building a life together for 5 years.

Ep 5 was the peak because it contained a very skillful buildup of tension with an extremely satisfying resolution. Because all the conflict after that just disappeared, we were cheated of a satisfying resolution. The couple never had to fight for anything to be together - they just were. For 7 more episodes with very little happening plot-wise. If there are no stakes, there's no tension, and nothing to invest in, so all you have left is cute boys being cute to each other, which is great, but disappointing if it's all there is.

The acting in this is very good. Ohm and Nanon obviously really like each other, so their relationship is comfortable, and Jimmy is a standout as Wai - he was downright scary in Ep 5 and he has a strong presence.

So if you want a fluffy feel-good series to watch, you can't beat this. But instead of being what it could have been, one of the best BL series of all time, the director just didn't know how to resolve the dramatic tensions he'd build up, so he just punted, and as a result, other than Ep 5, this series is eminently forgetable. I doubt anyone feels that way just after watching the finale, but I suspect many will, in fact, forget it fairly soon.

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A surprisingly good series

The first two episodes were confusing and not too engaging, but it's well worth giving it a chance.

This is one of the most attractive casts I've seen in a long time, and the acting is fairly good. There are three couples, the main pair and the two side couples - as is not uncommon, the side couples far outshone the main pair, who were the weakest in every regard - their story was odd and full of holes, they looked like they were held at gunpoint to play gay, and their kisses were among the worst I've ever seen. Fortunately, J-Min has his singing career to fall back on, and Kim Yeong Suk looks really, really good with his shirt off, and I liked that the show didn't pretend his abs had no effect on Lee Hyun.

The other two pairs have wonderful chemistry and their characters are more appealing, with MVP going to Lee Kwang Hee as Maru, who is a powerhouse of vulnerability and cuteness and yet so sexy.

I liked how this was about pairs of guys, and didn't divide them into ukes and semes - in fact it subverted expectations. You would assume Sung Min was the seme - older, taller, more muscular. and yet passive and shy, whereas Joo Hyuk is more assertive and confident. None of which means anything in real life about who does what in bed.

The last episode is a bit of a throw-away and could have been skipped, although it wasn't unpleasant.

Anyway, I'd recommend this - it's possibly my favorite BL series lately.

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What a disappointment.

This series started strong and I was looking forward to seeing where it would go. More or less nowhere, it seems.

I don't like to criticize actors, and it's possible it was the directing, but Kazuma was bad. When he was angry it was embarassing. Ren was a little better, but he didn't have to do much more than mope and be pathetic.

The directing drained all the life out of the story, and they followed the manga too closely instead of adapting it. But the writing was inexcusably lousy, so the screenplay might as well be too, I guess?

Example: a manga can give strong forward motion by portraying someone running for a panel or two. But when it's live action, you stop paying attention because your mind is preoccupied by two questions: if he's in that big a hurry, why is he running across Tokyo instead of taking a cab? And, how did he manage to do that in dress shoes and a wool suit without breaking a sweat? As if that wasn't bad enough, in the finale he did it again. Twice. (To be fair, the third time taking a cab wouldn't have helped, but I was still preoccupied wondering how Ren got past Kazuma to leave the building. The core where the elevator is would make him have to go past Kazuma, or at least run all the way around the core to the other side of the elevator lobbly.

The series is jammed full of tropes without giving us any compensation. Ren is one of the worst examples of a weak infantilized uke, who can't even defend himself against a falling-over drunk man that's at least twice his age but half his size. Because he takes it up the a$$ and Sanada is a man, I guess. It's ridiculous and offensive. A 12-year old girl would have been able to deal with Sanada, let alone a grown man.

The coincidences are absurd. The population of Tokyo is 40M and it's not a very dense city - so after search the world for 10 years and coming up with nothing, he happens to get a job at the same company? I took if for granted thta Ren arranged for Kazuma to work there, but nope, just a coincidence. Then Ren runs into Kazuma's mother. Then runs into Sanada when he goes to get his things. Why would Sanada go back to the office after going out and getting drunk? And in the brief window where Ren is there?

The relationship between Ren and Kazuma is passionless. At the end they spend the night, and don't even cuddle in bed - in fact Kazuma is actually holding Ren at arm's length so their bodies don't touch. Come on. It's 2023. They don't need to have sex, but they need to look like they want to. It's really sad and weird that the two child actors had way more sexual chemistry than the adults. And apparently more sex.

The end is totally anticlimactic. Kazuma's mother explains she was only upset because they were underage - so then why did she whack Ren across the face? It doesn't make sense. And why did she tell her maid or whoever that was that she's afraid if Ren and Kazuma meet up, they'll never part, but then in the next scene tell them she has no problem with them being gay. What? That makes zero sense - someone behaved completely illogically to throw a red herring at us to generate artificial and pointless drama that doesn't go anywhere and instead deflates like a sad balloon that wandered away during a party and deflated in some dark corner.

In the end, there's just no point to the whole story. What is it about? There were interesting dynamics set up at the beginning, with hints of Ren's depression and trauma, but it goes nowhere. This is just some weird fantasy of the writer to get a strong man to take care of her. Great.

I'd skip this. You'll like it at first, but it becomes a big disappointment.

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Great until the ending

If you were to see this score and then watch the ep, you'd think, "what's wrong with this guy? This show is great!" Well, wait until the last minute. There's a line that is the most tired thing that exists in BL, and they had to go and throw it in.

I can honestly recommend not watching this - just watch the excellent first part and use your imagination from there. You will miss almost nothing, as this ep is the same story from Film's perspective, so the only additions are a few insights into what he was thinking in the previous episode. The continuation of the story is only in the last minute, when IMO it's ruined.

I'm actually angry. In a "typical" BL, it would just make me roll my eyes, but here it feels like throwing cargo pants on Michaelangelo's David. The acting and dialogue (with that exception) are excellent, as is the editing, which respects the audience and is efficient from a storytelling perspective. But that stupid line.

It was refreshing to watch a BL that's not crippled by adherence to the seme/uke model - here you could have two guys acting like guys, instead of one of them having to faint whenever touched by sunlight or tripping every time he tries to walk.

But then they had to ruin it. I hope they pair these two in a better project.

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The North Star never moves, and neither does this story.

This story was BL Plot #3, "Boys kept apart by implausible miscommunication". If both of a pair are in love with each other, mutual friends know that, and one of them doesn't talk about anything else (and yet everyone wants him), and on top of that, one of them actually told the other that he likes him, how is it possible that nothing happened? That puts Khluen into the "you are a total idiot and deserve to die alone" category.

In today's world, how is it possible NOT to know that two people broke up several years ago? Dao is obsessed with Khluen and never looked at his social media, or Gia's? Have you ever had a crush on an actor, saw him in an instagram photo with a girl, hated it, hurriedly copy/pasted what he wrote into google translate and was relieved it's his sister? Yeah, I have too. And Khluen was clearly very upset by whatever Gia said on the phone before he rushed off, so a non malignant narcissist would have said "OMG, is everything OK?" instead of making it all about him.

Everything about the plot is contrived, the characterization is inconsistent and implausible, and nobody has agency except Dao, who uses all of it to be a self-absorbed prat. And the series really boring. Try to decribe the plot. For example, Not Me would be "A guy replaces his evil twin in a marxist motorcycle gang to fight for justice and falls in love with his brother's enemy." That sounds ridiculous (and it is), but there is no world in which I would not watch that. This is "Two guys who have been in love with each other for several years continue to not communicate for seven episodes while nothing else happens."

Dunk is cute, and Joong is attractive enough, but there was just zero heat. I kept shipping Dao with Fah because there was so much more chemistry between them. Sure, they're brothers and it's wrong, but that would have been a lot more intesting than this. If not for Mek, I would have dropped this lifeless series. Honestly, the brotherly love scenes with Dao and Fah are the only thing about this that worked for me. Fah's reaction when he walks in on Dao and Khluen was actually funny, unlike all the fart and poop jokes.

The technical aspects were weak, with inconsistent lighting in scenes. The very last one where they're on a dock at night looked like someone was flashing a spot light on them on and off. And the soft-focus filter was again abused to the point that everyone looked botoxed to within an inch of their lives and their facial expressions were smoothed away.

I would skip this. If you're more interested in the follow-on series about Fah and Prince, there is absolutely nothing in this series that you need to see to understand Star In My Heart, which is clearly to a painful extent "inspired" (to be generous) by another series you may have watched that takes place in the mountains.

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Adorble and clever

This is a story about a man's dog and cat coming back from the afterlife as humans - I don't think so much reincarnated as incarnated.

The casting and acting are wonderful - although human now, the pets still act like a dog and cat - Choco (dog) follows his former master everywhere, even at home, and escapes to follow Jung Woo when he goes out (especially if he's on a date), and Milk plays the "love me. Stop touching me" game of a cat.

There's no particularly important message to this, other than perhaps Carpe Diem, but it's relentlessly pleasant and fluffy without ever being cloying.

My only criticisms are, and the first is specific to me, the guitarist on the soundtrack kept sliding his fingers down the fret, which sets my teeth on edge and I often had to watch on mute.

More substantially, this is overly sanitized from the source material, being a hard G-rated. Choco is just plain sexy, but other than that, there was no heat between the leads - they had decent "hug" chemistry, but it felt like a primary school romance rather than an adult one, and that limited chemistry made it hard to invest as much as I would have liked to in the romance.

Still, this is one of the better series that aired this year, and is one you can go back to over and over.

The finale clearly set things up for a S2, which would be welcome.

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