Name: I RAISED A TIGER CUB

first kill is my new favorite show because it had lines like “it was no match for the gods of olympus. so why would i be immune to the insanity of first love?” but also “did you eat…. my mother?” and that duality is camp

For the Love of Safe Sex (pt. 13)

HIStory 4: Close to You.

OUR DATING SIM episodes 7-8

spooky tuesday is a (now not so new!) podcast where we’re breaking down all of our favorite slashers, thrillers, monster movies and black comedies on the new scariest day of the week.

we know it’s only tuesday, but could you tell us we’re your favorite podcast in the world? we think we need you to say it every morning from now on, especially this week while we cover death becomes her (1992). this goofy black comedy features oscar winners meryl streep and goldie hawn as passionate frenemies — and oscar-winning special effects when that passion spills over into violence. a cult classic close to our own hearts here at spooky tuesday, this flick illustrates the true meaning of best friends forever, because what’s immortality worth without your bestie by your side?

give spooky tuesday a listen on apple podcasts, spotify, iheart radio, or stitcher

The Dark Side of BL

@weekendatennuis​ asked: 

Your BL curriculum breakdown today was *chef’s kiss* and the 10 cutest BLs was delightful but sometimes this little sunshine likes a little more heat and dark! 

Have you done a breakdown of the darker ones?

Ooo, thank you and this is interesting. Because I recently got Gaga, I’ve been working my way through their back catalogue which includes some of the most dark BLs ever made (Japanese, of course). 

How dark do you want it? Do you want a list of dark BLs that I still think are good and watchable? Or just a list of some of the darkest BLs ever? 

Here’s:

Top 10 BLs without an HEA still worth watching & 3 that will wreck you 

But these aren’t necessarily dark. However, those 10 are about what I would go with as my favorites. Since I don’t wallow much. I respect the need to wallow, though. So I guess I have to remove my taste and really play. 

I am not going to include betrayal shows (like My Bromance, In Between Seasons, Grey Rainbow, History3: Make Our Days Count where the “twist” is one of the characters dyeing unexpectedly) or the Doomed Gays of Chinese History (e.g. The Male Queen). 

Also, some of the following might not really qualify as BLs anymore. I did not include microfilms. If I remember where I saw it I included the source. 

The 10 Darkest BLs I’ve Ever Seen 

TRIGGER WARNING ON EVERYTHING!!! A lot of them are also VERY high heat. These are in order, starting with darkest/worst. 

1. The Shortest Distance series (Japan 2019-2020 GaGa) [1. The Shortest Distance is Round (Noir) AKA Saitankyori wa Mawari Kudokute; 2. The Shortest Distance is Round 2: Rain and Soda AKA Saitankyori wa Mawari Kudokute: Ame to Soda Mizu; 3. The Shortest Distance 3: Fallen Flowers AKA Saitankyori Wa Mawari Kudokute: Rakka Ryūsui] - OKAY SO this is the darkest BL I’ve ever seen, it’s so dark it pushes into absurdist. It gets to a point where you’re like: so he cuts off his own junk for love? Of course he does. What else would he do? It’s teacher/student, false accusation, hustler, explicit sex with multiple men, and includes abuse, rape, violence, and mutilation, possibly a few others as well. But seriously, by the final installment I was all *yawn* TRY to shock me, boys. 

2. Dangerous Drugs of Sex AKA Sei no Gekiyaku (Japan 2020 GaGa) - erm, right, so this is a suicidal man kidnapped right before he jumps and then kept and sexually tortured (high kink) by a doctor for… reasons. Explicit. Ends “happy” by some people’s standards. VegasPete the first installment. 

3. Double Mints (Japan 2017 GaGa) - codependency, murder gay, bullying, humiliation and torture kink, self mutilation, Yakuza violence, rape, attempted suicide. Ya know, whatever.  

4. Forbidden Love (Japan 2008 GaGa) - whipping boy trope, servant who grew up in the sinister mafia-esk family. Spoiled, rich, loose-cannon seme madly in love with the older, somber, moral-compass uke. Homophobic family, cheating, murder gay, incest, & necrophilia! Oh goodie.  

5. Boys Love the series (Japan 2006 YouTube) - murder gay, mild necrophilia, cheating, abuse, rape, and ends with suicide for love.

6. Boys Love the movie AKA Boys Love 2 Schoolboy Crush (Japan 2007 YouTube) - teacher/student, obsession, desperation, abuse, mutilation. 

7. Light (Taiwan 2021 GaGa) - ironically named movie about a street hustler (incest, rape, abuse survivor all depicted on screen) who falls in (and in love with) an undercover cop. 

8. A Round Trip to Love (2016 China YouTube) - 2 parts, obsession goes rotten in China’s favorite way: kidnapping, rape, and uke sacrifices himself into death for the sake of his abuser. Because how else could it possibly go? 

9. The Effect (Thailand 2019 YouTube) - classic uni-set Thai BL, seme falls madly in love with beautiful uke but it goes the way such kinds of obsession actually would in real life - into stalking, rape, abuse, accusations, and suicide.  

10. Red Wine on a Dark Night (Thailand 2015 DramaCool) - I think this might be meant to be a slasher flick but it comes of more as basically “baby is a murder gay” weeeeeee. 

Moody Arthouse Smackdoodle 

Some that are more moody and angsty and cerebral dealing with depression and the like with an edge of honest queerness. 

Your Name Engraved Herein (Taiwan 2020 Netflix) - this movie is fantastic but it is also seriously depressing, it’s a self acceptance journey, but if you wanna wallow in high quality acting and serious gay drama, this’ll do it. 

Goodbye Mother AKA Thua Me Con D (Vietnam 2019 Netflix) - like YNEH this is a great movie but it deals openly with homophobia, bashing, family trauma and social acceptance. 

For Love, We Can (Hong Kong 2014) - an indie movie about parental homophobia, light/dark pairing, and (of course) HIV. 

The Cornered Mouse Dreams of Cheese AKA Kyuso wa Chizu no Yume wo Miru (Japan 2020) - obsession, cheating, breakup, reunion, then break up again, explicit. 

Pornographer movie series - AKA The Novelist, Mood Indigo, Pornographer Playback (Japan 2018-2020) emotional manipulation, cheating, obsession, seduction, May/December (age gap AKA younger/older), kink, touch of necrophilia, explicit.   

Method (Korea 2017) - May/December, actor idol pairing, that should have been everything I wanted in life but it’s more about the actor cheating on his wife and their weird “artsy” relationship and frankly, I hated this. And I don’t say that lightly. 

Itsuka no Kimi e (Japan 2007 YouTube) - okay this is basically about a college student who saves this boy from drowning and then gets embroiled in his, and his identical twin’s messed up lives. It goes very weird.

His the series AKA I Didn’t Think I Would Fall In Love (Japan 2019) - boy goes to visit his absent father ends up kinda homeless on the beach gets adopted by local family falls in love with the boy working and living with them. Lots of long drawn out glances. 

Innocent (Taiwan 2021 GaGa) - mental health, childhood trauma, actually kinda sweet. 

Okay But Make it Really BL-ish 

These are all more BL with a strong representative sampling of darker themes and problematic yaoi tropes. So if you are enjoying Utsukushii Kare then these are worth investigating. In thematic order. 

Does the Flower Bloom? (Japan 2018 YouTube) - bridging the gap to the arthouse style this is a May/December romance about an artist student and the house he inherits from his recently dead parents and all the people around him who are obsessed with him, including an older man. 

Takumi-Kun (Japan 2007-2011 YouTube) - series features all the problematic tropes and watches almost exactly like yaoi reads, the leads do have good chemistry, though. Includes incest, abuse, dub-con, and obsession.

Addicted Heroin (China 2016 Viki) - unfinished due to censorship but still very good, well acted and shot, high school set, rich kid falls madly for the genius poor kid in his class, starts an aggressive pursuit, includes kidnapping for love, obsession, stepbrother trope, plus some cheating. I love this one. 

Capture Lover (China 2020 Viki) - the ending is a touch confusing but basically this is the rich kid seme with nothing better to do, put to work in an office, falls hard for the strict boss, moves himself in and aggressively seduces him. Like a grown up Addicted. (Features Han Jing Chen, China’s Singto.) 

River Knows Fish Heart (China 2018 GaGa) - this BL managed to sneak by the censors probably because it’s not very well acted and low budget. It’s also in Addicted territory, only this time with the jock who falls madly for the nerd and then just moves into his house to takes over his life. The tsundere uke is VERY tsundere and the seme is hella pushy so it goes right into dubcon territory but also it’s very teen angst about it.  

Irresistible Love: Secrets of the Valet 1 & 2 (China 2016 YouTube) - 2 parts, I not-so-secretly love this BL. Kidnapping, whipping boy, obsession, mutilation, very hard fought happy ending (in one version). Absolutely classic Chinese BL pre-censorship. 

Legend of Long Yang AKA Rebirth (China 2017 GaGa) - whipping boy trope… literally, servant character takes the strap for the prince, who then makes him his bodyguard and lover when he becomes king. Low budget historical, comes off as kind of cosplay wuxia version of Irresistible Love, but we get (in the credits) an actual kiss, and they both live. So yay for small mercies. 

HIStory Obsessed (Taiwan 2017 Viki) - the softest version of the world’s most problematic yaoi tropes, while still managing to be those tropes. 

HIStory 4: Close to You (Taiwan 2021 Viki) the side dish plot is basically a pastiche of problematic BL tropes inherited from the above. Great chemistry, high heat, stepbrothers, dubcon, obsession, stalker etc… 

You might also try some of the ones I really loved but are only borderline BL (no cheese, no cringe, no smarm) 

Not Me (Thailand) 

Manner of Death (Thailand) 

3 Will be Free (Thailand) 

Triage (Thailand) 

Love Mechanics (Thailand) 

I Told Sunset About You (Thailand) 

Old Fashion Cupcake (Japan) 

Life: Love On The Line director’s cut (Japan) 

What Did You Eat Yesterday? (Japan) 

Restart After Come Back Home (Japan)

Blueming (Korea) 

Long Time No See (Korea) 

To My Star (Korea) 

Ocean Likes Me (Korea) 

DNA Says Love You (Taiwan) 

(source)

Japanese QL Corner

In which I cling to the last vestiges of two of my favorite shows of the year, write a eulogy for one of the most disappointing, and rejoice over the entry of a new fav. These shows are available for weekly streaming on Gaga unless otherwise noted.

Mr. Mitsuya's Planned Feeding

Farewell to a wonderful show. @isaksbestpillow has posted all seven episodes as of last week, so if you've been waiting for a binge, now is your chance. I already said a lot about why I loved this one, so I'll just use this space to urge you again to watch! This show is a goddamn delight.

Takara's Treasure

The main narrative ended last week, but this week we got a sweet little epilogue and one more visit with Takara and Taishin. I enjoyed the brief glimpse into their near future and getting to see Taishin turn 20 with his very first fuzzy navel, though I was a bit sad we got a repeat of the finale's themes rather than treading new ground for their relationship (I could not have cared less about the fujoshi writing RPF). This was a lovely show and I will miss these characters.

Happy of the End

CWs: Assault, child abandonment, child molestation, childhood sexual slavery, dubcon (including between the main characters), human trafficking, rape, sexual coercion and exploitation, suicidal ideation/possible attempt, unsafe S&M practices, violence

A very rough week for this show in terms of the content--please mind the triggers above because these are explicit depictions and it can be hard to stomach. I am waiting to see where this show is going with its themes before I make a final judgment, but watching the fourth episode in particular, some parts felt like crossing the line into gratuitous trauma porn that provided little additional illumination. We'll see how it shakes out in the end, but please take care with this one. I continue to find the characters and relationship dynamics compelling, and I am invested in Haoren and Chihiro's attempt to have a relationship despite the metric ton of baggage they are shouldering between them. Neither is equipped to even have any idea what a healthy relationship looks like, but they see something in each other and they want to try. That tiny bit of hopeful but likely doomed thinking may be all we have to cling to in this story.

I Hear the Sunspot

Sigh. I am sad about what this show could have been. For me, the finale definitely did not succeed at sticking the landing and making the last six weeks of wheel spinning feel worth it, and this show is going down as one of the big disappointments of the year for me. As you know if you've been keeping up with this weekly post, I loved the first half of this show, and Taichi's original characterization, so much. And I don't understand what happened here. The second half has felt like a completely different, confused, demonstrably worse show. Taichi hasn't felt like himself in weeks, the plots with Maya and the job at Sign were poorly grounded, inconsistently executed, and offered little pay off either thematically or in terms of character development, and the romance writing was a complete failure. It was actually painful to see Kohei run after Taichi and confess to him again, and the directing and editing of that sequence was so muddled that I had no idea what I was supposed to understand about Taichi's emotional journey or why this was the moment he was suddenly able to reciprocate. After all that brooding and his big speech about communication, he did not communicate much of anything to Kohei in the end. And I'm supposed to be content with leaving them here? Deeply unsatisfying on just about every level.

I understand from @twig-tea that while the story followed the beats of the manga's first two volumes at a high level, this production chose to remove many of the contextual details that actually made sense of the characters' behavior. It also seems they didn't understand they were setting up character arcs that did not get resolved until a later volume the show will not cover, thus ensuring the story would end at the wrong place. Just a baffling set of adaptation choices, and so much wasted potential. It's a shame.

Love is Like a Poison

But at least we have a new favorite coming in hot a week sooner than expected! I absolutely loved this first episode, in which we meet Shiba, our cold-hearted lawyer with delusions of grandeur and a sexually charged fixation on his house plants, and Haruto, our flirty scammer who has his number. This show is really well written and packed a ton of story, comedy, and deep characterization into its first episode. It's a promising start! For now it’s only available grey outside of Japan; I am hoping it will get picked up for proper international distribution soon.

Tagging @bengiyo to add this week's anime update.

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