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Saturday 28 March 2020

The weirdest BL drama I've watched so far


By Yuli Attta

Hi guys! Today I'm talking about a certain BL drama I recently finished watching and how weird it was. 

For those of you who don't know, BL stands for 'boys love'. I don't know how popular of a genre it is if you aren't looking specifically for it but it seems to have a big market in Thailand because they come out with multiple dramas a year. I recently finished TharnType and Until We Meet Again which aired last year and were completed early this year. I loved both and I've watched many more before. I'm currently watching Why R U? wich I'm obsessed with and 2gether which I'm also obsessed with. Thre's another currently ongoing show called My Engineer that I'm yet to watch but it's on my list.
However, the show that I'm going to be discussing today is called I'm Your King and I will briefly go over season 1 and then I'm going to talk about the real topic of today's post - season 2.

The first season of this show has just a few episodes and from the very beginning, you can see that it'snot taking itself too seriously and it doesn't have a proper storyline. It's about a group of friends ho play the King game and through it, they unconsciously create some drama among themselves. Relationships are broken and created and it's certainly a weird but entertaining show. The story isn't the best out there and nor is the budget. Now, usually, those shows don't have the biggest budget anyway but it's very clear that in this case, it's even lower than usual and it's fine. I believe that the acting is slightly better than the one in the second season an personally, I actually really enjoyed the last episode and when I found out there was going to be a second season I was excited because I thought it would be able the same character.

I was wrong.

Needless to say, I didn't like it and here's why:

The second season has a completely different cast, storyline and budget. It's clear the budget is a bit bigger than the one for the first season, there are more actors and there's the story about a bunch of friends playing the King game and creating drama among themselves.

We have the now cliche girlfriend who acts like a bitch for the sake of the drama but she ends up being irrelevant except for one of her last scenes which honestly came out of nowhere because we never saw her interact properly with her own friends, it was all about her personal drama with Sib, her boyfriend and one of the main characters.

I should probably mention that most actors take part in these shows as a way to start or boost their acting career, it's all about the CV in most cases and it's way too obvious in this drama, you can pretty much feel that the actor's hearts aren't in this. While I can imagine how uncomfortable it must be for a group of straight men to act gay, most good actors would get past it like in the shows I mentioned in the beginning. Even in the first season, the acting was on point if a bit cringe.  

Now, I don't think it was entirely the actors' fault that the series was bad. They certainly weren't at their best game but honestly, the storyline was just terrible.

Usually, those BL dramas are based on novels, I don't know if it's the case with this one but it wasn't great.

The storyline was so confusing, I'd have to go to the comments as I was watching and hope for somebody to explain what I had just watched. Some scenes wouldn't transition smoothly at all. There was this one scene in episode 5 or 6 when Pun and M were talking and M was apologising for his homophobic behaviour (I will go over the plot in a minute) and they were alright, sitting next to each other. The next minute Pun started crying. It was one of the worst crying scenes I've seen mostly due to the dialogue because he said "The tears just keep coming on their own." when he clearly had no tears in his eyes. I think that the actor should've probably learned how to cry with tears or the writers would've adjusted the line to suit his acting.

The story goes as follows, Pun is looking for a job and he gets one as a barista at this place owned by a friend of one of the main characters. His interview is weird because one of the questions he gets asked is if he knows how to play the King game. He gets hired and then it transitions to him playing with the owner's group of friends. I was skipping during the whole of this show so I'm not sure how it came to it but at the end of the episode Pun and Sib (the friend of the owner) kissed in the car. In the next episode, Pun met Sib's brother who made a very rude homophobic remark and for a while, he was behaving like a douchebag while Pun was trying to befriend him because Sib asked him t look after him.

I don't know how but Em, Sib's brother, came to like Pun and developed feelings for him. I don't know if it was due to me skipping so much or because of the messy storyline but I definitely didn't see it coming. However, Em is the best actor of the bunch, you could clearly see the emotion on his face, how hard he fell for Pun and when he cried, h cried real tears. His character was horrible until it wasn't anymore but the actor did his job very well. because everybody's acting was not that great, he just stood out so much and he certainly became my favourite character purely based on the acting.

Sib's character was terrible because he was obviously in a relationship and at the same time he was experimenting with his sexuality, advancing on Pun, who was quite innocent and naive. Pun would basically just let everybody make advances on him even though he had clear feelings for Sib. I don't know how okay he was with the fact that Sib had a girlfriend, I skipped a lot but I felt terrible for both Pun and Sib's girlfriend, they definitely didn't deserve such behaviour, even if his girlfriend wasn't the nicest towards Pun. But as I said, she had her own weird romance.

I feel like Sib just used his friends, use Pun and his girlfriend and he really isn't a great character. I can't say much about the actor's work since I really couldn't care less.

The ending was one of the most unsatisfying finales of a show I've watched since... I don't even remember the show's title. It was just so weird and I wish it had ended in a different way that made sense. I wish the whole plotline had made sense. 

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