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A Man Who Defies the World of BL 2024 (Japanese Series)

After a couple of years off, the creators finally dropped a third season of this show, oddly titled with 2024 in it for some reason I genuinely can't figure out. The story basically picks up right where things left off, following our lead Mobu as he keeps trying to survive inside this whole BL universe, just another character desperately trying not to fall for another guy. Season two left us with his relationship with Kikuchi, and this season kicks off right as Kikuchi heads off to university, which means Mobu's single again and honestly couldn't be happier about it. With six episodes, each running about 23 minutes, this is a quick, easy watch. Now that Mobu's back to being single, he's got to stay alert for every signal or trope that could end up pulling him into another relationship with a guy if he's not careful. So across these episodes, we watch him run into two of these signals per episode through the people around him and how they end up falling for each ...

The Sun from Another Star (Thai Series)

The whole Fourever You universe in Thai BL has been expanding quite a bit lately. I liked the original show a good amount, but these spin offs have honestly been hit or miss for me. This particular one's been getting massive praise all over the internet, so I went in expecting to love it too, but turns out I'm apparently the outlier here because I really didn't enjoy it. You know something's wrong when you just stop caring about the main characters, and that's exactly what happened to me watching this. At eight episodes plus a bonus special, with each one running anywhere from 55 to 70 minutes, it's also asking for a serious chunk of your time. The story kicks off when Daotok lands a new condo after scoring an insane 70% discount on rent. The catch is that the building's crawling with restless, noisy spirits who won't stop causing chaos. Since ghosts don't scare Daotok at all, he takes the deal without a second thought. He's an introverted guy wh...

Connie And Carla

This one's a light, fun musical comedy through and through. I wouldn't exactly call it a gay film in the strict sense, but with so much of it built around drag culture and the way the two main characters end up finding a home for themselves within the LGBT community, it definitely earns a spot as a queer friendly watch. It's not trying to be deep or serious in any way, but purely as entertainment, I had a genuinely good time with it. The plot's pretty straightforward. Connie and Carla have been best friends since they were kids, and now they're struggling singers and performers trying to make it, even though their boyfriends don't seem too thrilled about their dreams. Everything changes when they witness their club boss getting murdered and have to run for their lives. They end up choosing LA as their escape since it's far enough away that the criminals won't be able to track them down. Once they settle in, they stumble into a drag club completely by acc...

Double Helix (Chinese Series)

There's a lot packed into this show, and it stretches across something like 10 to 12 years of story time. At points it genuinely felt like watching one giant soap opera, though in a good way. It's like two strands of a double helix, once certain lives get tangled together, fate just won't let them fully separate. Across 12 episodes, each about 45 minutes, we follow our two leads through this long journey that moves from friendship into love, then separation, then obsession, and eventually back to love again. It centers on a wealthy heir and a warm hearted top student who get torn apart for a decade, both left scarred by family drama and eventually consumed by this intense, obsessive bond. Lu Feng comes from serious money and falls hard for his classmate Xiao Chen. Xiao Chen's hesitant about it initially but eventually comes around, and the two start a genuinely happy relationship for a while, until things fall apart because of circumstances outside their control. The sh...

Cheonhajangsa madonna (Korean) [Like A Virgin]

This South Korean comedy handles gender dysphoria with a surprising amount of warmth and care. Worth keeping in mind that it's an older film, so it's not really focused on the mechanics of transitioning itself, it's more about someone chasing the freedom to just live as who they truly are. I noticed some comments pointing out that the film skips over the actual transition process, but that's not really what it's trying to be about. It's a comedy about an outsider who stumbles onto something that pushes him one step closer to the life he actually wants. Dong-ku is a teenager who wants to live as a woman. He's stuck at home with a father who drinks heavily and only sees his mom every now and then. Before school he works down at the docks hauling rice just to scrape together some savings. Then, with some help from his oddball best friend, he figures out there's real money to be made by winning the national scholastic sumo championship, so he decides to go f...

Peach Lover (Thai Series)

Honestly, nobody needs to sit through this thing for the full seven hours it demands. The only way I made it through was accepting early on that it's garbage and just cranking the speed up so I could get it done in under half the runtime. There's basically no story here, it's a total guilty pleasure watch stuffed with wall to wall raunchy sex scenes that the leads clearly had zero hesitation filming. Writing, acting, directing, none of it holds up, and honestly it's baffling that anyone greenlit ten episodes of this running almost an hour each. Makes you wonder what universe the people behind this were living in. The setup follows Po, a guy who freelances designing book covers and spent his younger years kind of unsure about his own sexuality, which led him to porn, specifically clips from a performer called Peach Lover. This guy's whole thing is posting sex tapes online while always staying masked. At some point Peach Lover puts out word that his previous partner i...

Asian Mini-Series Collection - Part 4

Twosome Boys (Korean Mini-Series) - 2024 6 episodes of about 6 minutes each. Min and Suho are wannabe idols. They were not only friends but lovers at one time. Something happened to break them up which I never fully understood. Su Ho went on to form a group, leaving Min behind. Somehow they are thrown back together again and are literally forced to reconcile, forcing both to confront unresolved resentment and deep-seated heartache. There is mention of Min's abusive alcoholic father. This was one of the most confusing mini series I have seen where a lot just did not make sense at all and we, as audience are never given enough context on what the hell is actually going on. Completely avoidable. With Me (Korean Mini-Series) - 2025 6 episodes of about 8 minutes each. A classic story of couples not dong clear open communication. A couple has been together for 10 years and very much in love. When one of them starts to have secret phone calls and find excuses to leave, the other starts to...

Viet And Nam (Vietnamese)

I am really not one for those pretentious art house flicks where the creators try to throw in a million different themes, leaving viewers like me scratching their heads about the actual message, what was supposed to be the central journey, or what the director was attempting to get across in the first place. Don't get me wrong, the mood is undeniably intense since the gloomy plot takes place right after the war in Vietnam, packing in plenty of raw emotional weight, but I genuinely could not tell if the main goal was to tell a queer love story or simply wallow in pure misery. The plot follows two young guys, Viet and Nam, who scrape by doing brutal manual labor deep down inside coal mines. Money is tight, yet they manage to stay happy together as a couple, sneaking away on the job to share secret looks, quick kisses, and the occasional physical encounter in the shadows when nobody is around. Nam lives with his widowed mom, a woman deeply haunted by her late husband who went missing ...

Love Like A Bike (Thai Series)

This BL follows three guys who got adopted and grew up as brothers, and their bond runs just as deep as if they actually shared blood. Like you'd guess, the oldest brother's storyline gets the most focus and ends up being the central one, but the other two brothers and their romances still add plenty to the overall story. Biking seems to be the underlying theme tying things together, though it fades into the background a lot, leaving room for these quieter moments where each brother finds love in his own way and his own time. It runs eight episodes, each around 50 to 55 minutes long. Sailom is studying at university in the US and comes back to Thailand for a short trip to Phuket, where he ends up randomly meeting a soft spoken doctor named Nabnueng. The two hit it off right away, but Nabnueng quickly picks up on the fact that Sailom deals with aphenphosmphobia, meaning he can't handle being touched by anyone at all, not even close friends. What's strange is that he does...

Tide Of Love:Season 2 (Korean Series)

Season one of this show was already a total trainwreck, so when I found out there was a sequel coming, my first thought was genuinely how does something this bad even earn a follow up. Turns out the sequel manages to be just as terrible in every way you can think of. Eight episodes, each running 30 to 35 minutes, and getting through it felt like actual torture. It carries over all the same ugly patterns and red flags from the first season without changing a thing. Nobody was asking for this. Kim, the struggling art student, and Han, the rich controlling guy, are officially a couple now. Kim's stuck wondering why his art has lost its spark and why he's falling behind in school. Then a new antagonist shows up, Han's childhood friend, who's broody, mysterious, and good looking. Han's not a fan of him but they still end up grabbing tea together every so often. This friend happens to know exactly how Han turned into the manipulative, BDSM obsessed guy he is now, and he s...

Deleted Scenes

Every couple of months I somehow manage to forget who Todd Verow is and what his track record looks like, and I end up watching one of his films anyway, only to sit there afterward wishing I'd remembered sooner. This one's broken up into 24 chapters, framed as scenes that were supposedly cut, with a title card claiming they were removed for reasons like length, denial, melodrama, believability, dubbing, and sexual content. The story kicks off when Sean, a guy in his thirties, crosses paths with Wolf, an immigrant from Eastern Europe, and there's instant chemistry between them. They head back to Sean's place and dive into an intense, sex heavy relationship. What starts out as just a random encounter gradually turns into something with more weight behind it. Wolf's got a laid back nature and makes extra cash turning tricks on the side, while Sean is the opposite, clingy, chatty, and pretty wound up emotionally. Building anything solid between them turns out to be a ro...

Connecting To You (Taiwanese Series)

This series is basically the definition of a green flag watch. Two solid, likeable guys, barely any toxic drama, and just an all around warm vibe running through it, the whole thing feels sweet and puts a smile on your face pretty much the whole way through. It's twelve episodes, each clocking in around 25 minutes, and it flies by fast, but the chemistry between the leads, their smiles, and the overall feel of the show sticks with you well after it's done. Our main guy Jiakai has this strange gift where he can see invisible threads tying people to each other, and each color of thread means something different. That ability swings both ways for him, sometimes it helps him out, sometimes it lands him in a mess. The one sad part is he's never been able to see a thread linking himself to anyone else, so he's kind of resigned himself to being alone with no real connection of his own. Things kick off in a funny way when he gets arrested by a cop named Dawei while trying to he...

404 Still Remain (Korean)

Set in 2001, right at the start of the new millennium, this one's a gentle little coming of age story about two guys figuring out who they are. I don't know much about what that era was actually like over there, but going by what the film shows, being gay back then meant dealing with a ton of hostility, and even just being suspected of it was enough to get you targeted. Think about what high school would've been like under those conditions. On top of that, the movie also digs into that thing where gay people end up turning that hatred inward on themselves for reasons that make no sense. It's a small, tender kind of film. The story centers on Gyeong Hwan, a freshman who's just switched schools after moving to a new area. He ends up seated next to Jae Min, the class president, and the two hit it off once they realize they both love the same Japanese music. Because Gyeong Hwan comes across as shy and soft spoken, he becomes a bit of a target for bullies. As their bond ...

Aids: The Unheard Tapes (Documentary Series)

AIDS: The Unheard Tapes is a genuinely powerful three part BBC2 documentary that digs into audio recordings from the eighties and nineties, pulled from the British Library's archives, to piece together what the early HIV and AIDS crisis actually looked like in the UK. These recordings get brought back to life through carefully recreated period settings, with actors lip syncing the original voices. That's paired with present day interviews featuring activists, scientists, and doctors who were on the front lines fighting the virus and pushing back against all the misinformation and homophobia surrounding it. Each of the three episodes runs about an hour, and I'll just say upfront, this might be the single most important documentary made about AIDS history from a UK angle, and it should honestly be required viewing for everyone, especially within the gay community. The documentary opens at a point where homosexuality had already been decriminalized for fifteen years, yet arres...

Magic Move (Thai Series)

This series lands somewhere around decent, mixing romance, fortune telling, and a bit of chaos into one package. To its credit, the basic idea works fine, it's about pretending to be someone you're not just to win someone's heart, and then slowly getting buried under the guilt once the lies pile up. That's the core of it, but like most BL shows it plays everything out in a pretty light, fluffy way. Ten episodes here, each running close to an hour. Rit's our lead, a final year architecture student who unexpectedly turns into a viral sensation on campus known as the Prophecy Master. He reads fortunes using rune stones at his best friend Pure's neighborhood bar. What started as just a drunken story he told for fun ends up going viral and actually boosting business at the bar, so he just rolls with it. That's when Itthi enters the picture, the guy Rit's been crushing on for ages, who also happens to be the good looking heir to a wealthy real estate family. I...

Love After Addiction (Chinese Series)

Okay so this one had a strong start, genuinely fun and engaging for the first two or three episodes, but then it completely flips on itself as it goes on. The comedy around the games and challenges gets cranked way too far, basically turning into full blown reality TV territory, and at some point it just feels like the whole thing exists to sell you on the island it was filmed on. I'd bet there are more plot holes in here than anyone bothered counting. And then the ending just rushes past everything, the leads suddenly patch things up out of nowhere, and I genuinely sat there confused by how random it felt. Twelve episodes total, each around twenty five minutes. Yoki's a well known actor who's hit rock bottom after a string of scandals combined with ongoing insomnia tank his career. His manager pushes him to sign onto a reality show as a way to rebuild his public image. Not thrilled about it, he heads out to a small fishing village, where he unexpectedly runs into Yang Meng...