KoreanBL - Blog Posts

not so quick pitch 

Light on Me (2021 - Korea) 

Rating: 10/10

Foundational Romance Trope: friends to love triangle

There were some who thought this BL slow, and I get that, but really it’s just subtle and quiet. With Light on Me, Korea gave us an honest to goodness high school set BL with some classic old school yaoi tropes almost like they were doing a bit of a, 

“now that we’ve hit our stride, let’s perfect the vanilla sheet cake BL style.” 

It was great, of course, but very refined and elegant which some found off putting. It made me think of something like this… 

It’s what Korea does, repackage and perfect vanilla cake into this pretty glowing confection of precision joy. I’m cool with that. By all means, please include BL in the Hallyu take over. This is the K-pop of BL En-Hyphen style, manufactured super-powered cute but… restrained. 

But that doesn’t make it any less gut wrenching to watch. In fact, it makes every subtle tentative movement of care that ShinWoo attempts that much more telling. It makes every fear of exposure that prevents DaOn from taking action that much more traumatic. It makes every moment of TaeKyung’s brutal honestly and blunt communication that much more powerful. 

It’s like that intense moment of focus on the hand flex in an Austen adaptation - we are awaiting every crack in the sugar sculpture with bated breath. 

The filming in this show was precision engineered. The frame was kept uncluttered, characters appeared exactly in the center, there was little visual noise, and the lighting was full on, even in night shots. To me this reflected the character of TaeKyung - honest and almost stilted in his mannerisms. I feel like the director filmed this series as if the show itself were TaeKyung: careful and clear and specific. 

This may come off as one-note or simplistic to a casual viewer but it’s actually quite difficult to film something so precisely and still make it interesting to watch. It forced the viewer to focus almost entirely on the actor’s faces, their nuanced emotion, and their interpersonal relationships to the exclusion of all else. Lucky for us those actors served the lens beautifully. 

There is literally NOTHING distracting about this directing style. It’s like the camera was a neutral white room, a well-lit gallery in which the narrative hung suspended for us all to stand and stare at in hushed silence.

A love triangle has never before looked so perfect or been executed so perfectly, and it never will again. All BL love triangles that come after Light On Me (and we will get them now) are going to be unfavorably compared to this show. 

When I posted about Korea’s history with BL, I talked about how strategic and clever they are with tropes. Light on Me is a master class in how to use tropes to manipulate audience sympathy so they can’t decide which pair they prefer. Korean BL never just throws in a trope without purpose - they calculate its impact on story structure. Basically, LoM used this technique to infect fans with Second Lead Syndrome. It’s SO GOOD.  

So yes, Light on Me was cleverly engineered, but it was also SPECIAL, and here’s why:

This show gave us a small cast of beautifully acted complex and sympathetic characters and dwelled on their different motivations, communication styles, and narrative roles. It gently explored not what it means to love, or even be in love, but what it means to act on love, and what that says about integrity and emotional courage. In doing so, it managed to treat its characters with integrity too. And not just the three main characters but the mentor, the faen fatal, and the best friend support characters too. 

This show felt very fair. Fair to its characters. Fair to its story. And fair to us, the watchers. 

For me this BL was classy, a real winner, not the least of which because they NAILED the landing, including the final kiss. Korea is DOMINATING 2021. Like seriously. What’s going on here?  

Full analysis of the love triangle trope under the context of the second half fo this BL here. 

Bravo, Korea.

(source)

Daon learned how to say no.

Taekyung learned how to have friends.

Shinwoo learned how to be more expressive with his feelings.

But not a single one of them learned how to throw a surprise party.

Taekyung's neurodivergance is actually central to the story that Light On Me is telling. If he weren't different, if he didn't miss social cues or misunderstand people's reactions, he wouldn't be pursuing this friendship with Shinwoo. If he didn't have a single-minded focus that nothing could shake, he wouldn't insist on their friendship. None of this would happen if Taekyung understood social cues or the way other people think. His different way of thinking drives the entire story, all his relationships and all the ways he's helping the people around him. The same things that kept him isolated are now winning over the people he's coming to care for and that's beautiful.

You Make Me Dance 

I wasn’t going to do this anymore, but at least these short series out of Korea don’t lend themselves to epic posts. 

Look. It’s just. I HAVE THOUGHTS. 

Korea is being very strategic in their execution of topes and I think it’s a marker of their intent to dominate BL. Or at the very least an interesting side effect of their late entry into the market. They are picking up and playing with tropes in a very intentional way. It’s markedly different from the hap hazard check-list style (with occasional parody) that we get from Thailand, or the cartoon jocularity murder-gay of Japan (capricious god of BL), or the tongue-in-check meets earnestness of Taiwan. 

You Make Me Dance is doing BL tropes so very pretty. But simultaneously, kinda dirty too. 

You Make Me Dance Episode 1-2 

YMMD is a love story between Hong Seok (loan shark) and Shi On (student dancer). It’s also about the love of art and the passion that drives creators and those who experience and respond to their passion. Like all love stories, the drive is connection, but it’s on two levels when art is involved. There is not just a romantic connection to explore, but the intimacy of creativity and how it is received and absorbed. I’m not sure how deeply YMMD will go into is, but I’m excited to see them try. 

Fated Mates

Unexpectedly, YMMD launched with a take fated mates by talking about the red thread pinky-finger mythos. Shi On looks around on his bus and sees a stranger with his pinky finger up. They have a moment. 

But the real twist comes later when loan shark Hong Seok is sent to threaten Shi On and ends up wrapping a red scarf around Shi On’s feet. So many parallels:

that RED scarf around feet of a dancer, binding and limiting, like the red thread around the finger  

but also the care represented by a warm scarf around cold feet

the loan shark threat contrasted to the servile nature of tending to someone else’s feet

and then Hong Seok hoists Shi On over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes but also a dancer’s lift 

Then later we get Shi On hopping around, which was so cute and funny but is an allegory for the crippling nature of both fate and love. 

I think I both bounced and clapped. 

Pinky Swear

Honestly, if you have a physical trope like this one that’s all about body language, make a dancer do it. Very smart. This is such a childish innocent move and to have this sweet college kid give it out to a sinister loan shark when his life is on the line was kind of gut wrenching to watch. 

Also note the servile level, emphasizing the differential power dynamic? So clever. Contrasted to earlier when Shi On finished dancing and is standing before him, above him, filled with the power of having touched him with his dance. 

It also harkens back to the original pinky meeting on the bus and the red thread connection. 

So this pinky swear was both executed and subverted, and you know I love that. 

Rooftop 

They ended ep 2 with a rooftop assignation combined with crash into me. They are moving this one along quickly, which they have to with so few episodes.  

According to the series description we are heading towards forced proximity (cohabitation) which is a shorthand for forcing intimacy when you don’t have a lot of time to develop the story. 

Korea seems well aware that their curtailed time frame for these BLs means they need to crib in certain tropes to get any kind of character development (Color Rush used fated mates, To My Star and Wish You used forced proximity). 

I’m really looking forward to next week to see where YMMD goes with this. Since they have elegantly danced with all the tropes they picked up so far, forced proximity should be a waltz for them. 

Yes I am going to use dance metaphors and terminology with these recaps. Gotta put that dance minor to good use somehow. Right?