" I Want To Say Thank You. " (Ears Turn Red)

bonus:

#bl tropes who? #the lgbt energy in this building is astronomical!

Can you talk more about “I don’t want to fall for a man” because I am curious about your thoughts!

OOooh YES I CAN!

So I am an out and proud bi woman, and I grew up in a household where my parents (even my terrible one) told me it was okay to be gay. 

BUT I also grew up in a conservative town full of anti-gay rhetoric and lots of conservative ideas, so no matter how much my mum told me “it’s okay if you like girls” everything outside the walls of my house told me that that wasn’t true. 

I didn’t hate gay people, I wasn’t outwardly homophobic, in fact I outwardly was very supportive of the lgbt+ community, but the internal homophobia was VERY real. I convinced myself that everyone looked at girls like that, that even if you’re not gay, everyone knows that girls are just attractive, that’s just a fact. In my defence, it is, but I digress. 

There’s an annoying trope that comes up in so many Thai BLs like “I’m not gay I just like [INSERT NAME HERE]” because as everybody knows, you’re 100% straight if you are in love with, live with, marry and grow old with another man. These are indisputable facts. 

Almost none of them ever say they are bi or demi or pan, it’s pretty much always “not gay just you” or “oh I’m gay now, weird that” despite expressing interest in only women before that, and firstly that’s a massive amount of biphobia so jot that down. Secondly, it’s an incredibly heterosexual way to portray lgbt+ stories, and it’s honestly just boring to see at this point, like I had such high hopes for Tonhon Chonlattee and then it played itself out in the straightest way possible and I was just sort of baffled? by the time it finished. 

But Zhou Shu Yi doesn’t say “I’m not gay” he says “I don’t want to fall for a man”. When he tells Gao Shi De he has feelings for him, he doesn’t say “I’m not gay I just like you” he says “Because it’s you. I have no choice.” and those are VERY VERY different things. 

“I don’t want to fall for a man” is the kind of phrase that I think almost everyone in the lgbt+ community has thought some variation of. It’s something I thought a lot growing up - “I don’t want to like girls” “I don’t want to be a lesbian” “I don’t want to have a crush on [insert name here]”. I imagine - although I can’t confirm this - that it is NOT a phrase that straight people would be so intimately familiar with. For straight people who never question their sexuality, the statement would be “I’m not gay” not “I don’t want to be gay”. 

Why would you worry about wanting something if you know you don’t?

It’s a fear response to knowing you have those feelings but not wanting to address it: “I don’t want to feel that way because if I admit that I do, then it’s admitting that I’m different and that my life is going to change.”

And when Gao Shi De says “I thought you didn’t like boys” Shu Yi doesn’t say “I don’t, I just like you” he says “Because it’s you.” It’s not a dismissal of queer feelings or people, it’s an admittance that Gao Shi De is the thing that makes him stop wanting to suppress the thought of falling for a man, that he’s already fallen so there’s no point trying to run away from it anymore. 

Honestly it’s some of the best bisexual/demisexual representation I’ve ever seen? On this tiny Taiwanese BL with nowhere a big enough fanbase that deserves WAY more? and I just… It made me feel SO seen, it acknowledged a part of queer culture that I don’t often see on TV, even in BLs and I think that’s beautiful.

Sangwoo’s Semantic Error moment 

“You’re telling me right now!” BAD BUDDY (2021)

“when I saw you on that picture, all the memories of our childhood came back”

Love Triangles & Tropes

I have to talk about love triangles for a moment and it is all Light on Me’s fault. 

Most BLs don’t employ true love triangles. Instead they throw in a faen fatal as a plot device who is obviously not a real threat to the main couple for various reasons: 

They’re an underdeveloped character with little back story. 

They’re the wrong gender. 

They enter late in the narrative and/or have very little screen time. 

They engage in no significant romance tropes with the lead. 

With a faen fatal we all know that our two boys will end up together. 

A love triangle is different. 

In a love triangle the audience actually believes the second lead has a good chance of winning over the main character. The second lead is given back story, is the correct gender to be competition, and has significant screen time. And, of course, tropes are used to make the burgeoning romance believable. 

Guess who is great on love triangles and even better at giving audiences bad cases of Second Lead Syndrome?

Why yes, that would be Korea.

When I posted about Korea’s history with BL, I talked about how strategic and clever they are with tropes. I think this is one of the reasons they are so good at believable love triangles. 

But so far they haven’t given us a love triangle in BL… until NOW. 

Light on Me is the Perfect Love Triangle

For the purposes of argument (and because of various elements like the lingering gaze, romance narrative conceits, focus of the camera lens etc) I am going to go with the following:

TaeKyung = our POV or main character (uke*)

ShinWoo = Lead (seme) 

DaOn = Second Lead (seme)

* In addition to specializing in soft low heat BL, Korea likes a slow burn romance and a weak seme/uke dynamic. So we are going back to the original definition of uke: basically the character the others are pursuing and want to take care of. 

Light on Me is using heavy hitting BL tropes to weight TaeKyung’s options fairly. Almost every time the director doles out one significant trope to SinWoo they will then give the same trope to DaOn or vise versa. It’s so smart and fun to watch I started keeping score. 

Crash Into Me AKA Proximity Alert 

(Camera then shows ShinWoo watching this, when it’s a trope he already got to have with TaeKyung.) 

Messy Eater

(Camera then shows DaOn watching this, when it’s a trope he already got to have with TaeKyung.) 

Meet Me In The Library 

Head Touch

(Honestly I am Team ShinWoo solely based on this neck grab.) 

Wound Tending

Light on Me is a master class in how to use tropes to manipulate audience sympathy so they can’t decide which pairing they prefer. Basically, this is how you infect fans with Second Lead Syndrome. It’s SO GOOD. 

Also, did you notice how they spaced this flip-flopping out at first, but then it got closer together? Crash into me with seme 1 then not with seme 2 until a few episodes later. But as the series progresses and the tension increases, the same trope for one seme comes closer in time to the same trope for the other seme, until finally at the end of episode 8, both semes want to wound tend TaeKyung in the same scene! Which mean’s this show is also pacing its tropes to amp up love triangle tension. 

This is clever enough to be mind boggling. I can’t even. 

On the other hand, they will dole out specific tropes to each seme (that the other one doesn’t get to have). So ShinWoo got to tie the shoelaces. But DaOn loaned the umbrella. SinWoo gets to grab and physically demonstrate interest. DaOn gets to flirt and verbally indicate interest. 

Partly this is because TaeKyung is on an enemies-to-lovers arc with SinWoo, but on a friends-to-lovers arc with DaOn (see True Beauty). But also it’s because the two semes are very different personalities. 

Similarly the narrative parcels out TaeKyung’s responses accordingly. 

So TaeKyung collar grab’s SinWoo. This is a trope that is always uke to seme in an agro relationship, because when an uke acts aggressively you know something is going down. It’s commonly used to give uke agency for the first kiss (see We Best Love). TaeKyung also rescues ShinWoo from bullies and gets hurt in the process, another aggressive move with relation to this particular seme and more common in enemies to lovers (see PeteKao in the Kiss series). 

Since DaOn is on a friends to lovers track, TaeKyung is a lot softer with him. 

In fact TaeKyung keeps trying to take care of DaOn, and even performs some seme acts of service (even though he’s the uke character), which is Korea being unbelievably clever with their love triangle. I mean how can we not root for them as a couple? 

Look, I’ve seen the seatbelt trope a million times but only PeteKao have ever flipped it so far as I can recall, and that’s just because Pete keeps getting beaten tf up. This is the kind of proprietary behavior (see also buckling on a safety helmet) only performed by seme on uke. 

Also TaeKyung took care of DaOn when he was sick, remotely, but still he used the umbrella to tell DaOn who was doing it. This is playing with the idea of mutual responsibility and partnership which is very unusual in BL, and makes me like them as a couple all the more because they act on an equal footing. Mutual care is adorable. (See Oxygen for more of this kind of exchange.) 

The interesting thing about DaOn as a second lead is that we know more about his back story than we do our mains. We know he is a neglected child, a people pleaser, and the ultimate caregiver. We watch him fall in love with TaeKyung because TaeKyung is the first person to give DaOn care back. Of course he wants to hold onto that. Also it makes DaOn very very VERY sympathetic to watchers. 

It got bad enough in episode 8 that I begin to wonder, despite all the many narrative clues, if DaOn actually might win TaeKyung in the end. 

See what I mean? 

Second Lead Syndrome! 

I know this has been a praise post, but flipping heck do I hate a love triangle. Because ARGH I want them both! 

Bravo, Korea. 

Friendship Measurement Mission - Ohm & Nanon

Sehyoon mocking YG while wearing the hot pants that YG also happened to criticize, they don’t call him Wow for nothing 👀