Paunitka

Is the cultural difference really so huge?

I started to watch the show with high expectations, so the disappointment was all the bigger. First of all, the ML is absolutely intolerable. Because he used to be a good hacker 10 years earlier, he is arrogant, extremely rude, and keeps bullying other people. The FL, who is supposed to be an IT prodigy and a popular online singer, has no sense of pride or self-respect and chases the ML to the verge of ridiculousness, even though he openly told her that he wasn't interested and treated her like garbage most of the time. So painful to watch! But the worst is still to come. At the beginning, we learn that ML's former team leader did some horrible thing, which resulted in the team being disbanded. You know what that horrible thing was? It was his commitment to fatherhood and responsibility for his unplanned child. His new GF, a team member, was too much of an immature !@$%^ to support him - she preferred to dump him and that's how the whole team broke up. Is the Chinese culture really so different from European that decent behaviour and responsibility are seen as vile and wrong? While rudeness, immaturity and hatefulness are seen as virtues? I don't get it.
What I really liked were the charming supporting characters. I continued the show for them.

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What's real?

This movie invites the audience to an active interpretation - not only of the emotions and intentions of the characters, but also of the actual plot. Is the depicted event "real"? Is it her imagination? Is is his imagination? It also leaves you asking, what is more important: being free or being loved? Is it possible to have a relationship that is free from a power struggle? Why does the main character identify with that particular novel character, Josée?

The impact of this movie is so strong because of great acting, matching music and beautiful cinematography. I recommend it to people who enjoy some food for thought.

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Mental abuse of the viewer

This story mentally abused me. I was manipulated into shipping the main character, a cute, loving guy, with his cold, evil ex. Because the world is already ending, right? So why spend the last days alone, when you can have a company that makes your heart go faster? When binge-watching this series, I developed exactly this way of thinking. Nope! The main character should have stayed in his library, rather than letting that emotional parasite back into his heart, end of the world or not.
This manipulation was made possible because of how well the actors were cast and how well they were acting: they made the choices of the characters believable and commendable.
Otherwise, the plot has gaping loopholes, such as the whole motive of the pill of death, the appearance of that young boy, the way they met the idol's brother, and, above all, the idea of chaos, as the Japanese (cannot) imagine it.
Then again, I loved the actors and their chemistry was fire. Will probably rewatch the cute scenes...

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Friendship is love too

This movie shows beautifully that human emotions are complex and the question "do I love this person" might not be a "yes - no" question at all. This is not a typical love triangle, where two people love the same person and the viewers wonder "who will win?" In here, all three protagonists have some sort of positive feeling for one another, and their quest is to understand those feelings, which is not as easy as might be expected. Is it infatuation? Is it love? Is it just friendship? Why "just" - maybe friendship is actually as big as love - or bigger?

Dramatic War on the River

Most historic dramas focus on the power struggle, succession to the throne and wars between the neighbouring countries. Those subjects are fascinating and creating captivating dramas that tell those stories seems easy.
This series is absolutely unique! It focuses on an engineering projects - dam construction on the Yellow River. The subject sounds totally boring and I only started to watch this drama because of the beautiful cinematography - I did not expect to be invested. I was so wrong! It turns out that when you are a good story teller, you can take any subject and turn it into gold. Our characters fighting against the river, which poses detrimental threat to the people, turn out not only to be nerdy engineers, but also valiant heroes.
The level of attention to the detail is out of this world and if you watch closely, you can learn a lot about how people managed to do everyday work. Acting is top notch. Music is simply beautiful.
Trigger warning: the subject of war with Taiwan is also important in this drama, which is quite unpleasant, but an obvious censorship requirement, I suppose?

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Difficult, often ignored subject

This is probably the first movie with an intersex protagonist, even though intersexuality occurs in tens of millions people around the world. These people often undergo invasive surgeries without their consent and are deprived of any control over their bodies. How is it possible that we don't hear about this problem more often? Beats me. Hopefully, with movies like this one, the situation of intersex people will gradually improve.

People, really?

Are we really doing this? Are we writing reviews before even the last episode dropped? Are we crazy?
Well, I guess we are! Crazy in love with The Sign.
The cast is composed of eye candies, who also manage to show all those strong emotions that the plot requires them to. In short, beautiful and talented. OK, I didn't like the acting of one side character, so here you go, I'm objective, right?
The plot lets you follow a complex criminal case and learn about Thai mythology at the same time. You see Bangkok, but also venture out of the capital, which is always interesting. You follow the boys, as they their crazy training from Mr Inspector. You also get to see a modern dance performance and action painting, and oh my, what awesome action is that!
It's like if you asked the showrunners, what else are we going to have in this BL, and they simply answered "YES".
So it's a big YES from me.

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Intolerable Absurdity

The very premise of this show, with an arranged marriage - something extremely backwards - but a homosexual one - something progressive - is quite weird. But that's OK, I was curious how they would handle this concept and started watching in good faith. However, the idea that the older man in the arranged couple becomes the owner of the younger man, who has to obey him and cannot even go out without his permission - that was too much. The main character becomes a slave to his arranged fiancé and even his mother checks if he wasn't "naughty". The fiancé feels that he has every right to control and adult person, tell him what to do, what not to do and how to behave. What a horrible, suffocating, toxic situation! With such power relations, building love chemistry is simply impossible. I admire the actors, who did their best to make it look realistic, but even though they are clearly talented, the level of absurdity was simply too high.

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Swiss Cheese

Let's start from the good things. I loved the actors. They created every character in a credible way - including the characters that weren't all that well written. This applies of course to the main leads, with their contrasting personalities, the sister, hysterical and bitchy, the rich friends, spoiled and vain, as well as the thief, smoothly manipulating his a** out of troubles. I would also like to mention the mother character: she is just there, looking elegant, watching soap operas, enjoying her son-in-law's cooking, and never causing unneeded drama. Way to live!
The romance between the main leads was shown perfectly, taking the censorship into consideration. Watching those two mess with each other and care for each other all the time was pure pleasure. The way Gong Jun's character teases his bf, takes money out of his pocket because he knows he can, and simply moves in at some point is cute and hilarious at the same time.
Here the good things end and I need to talk about the plot. Starting from the premise, where a dude agrees to hit on another dude in the name of his younger sister, the whole story is absurd. The characters' actions are sometimes weird or stupid, or even plain criminal, but they don't get called out on this. And don't even get me started about the ending. Construction workers need a rich boy's help? Really? And then leave him in the well to freeze? Really, really? It's a pity, because with a story less offensive to reason, this could really be a great series.

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Modern-day Korean Raskolnikov

A good, sensitive boy notices, how bad the world is, and comes up with a rather bad idea himself. His sharply intelligent, sociopathic girlfriend is a nice replacement of the Dostoevsky's Sonya character. Practically all characters are mentally disturbed. The bully and his minions seem to have no understanding of good and evil, or, if they do, they happily choose the latter. The teenage prostitute sells her body in order to buy her boyfriend's love. FL's mother is a travesty of a tiger-mother, who seems to draw sadistic pleasure from humiliating her daughter. ML's "business" partner most probably suffers from PTSD. Only the teacher and the policewoman seem to be sane and decent, but their world is so far away from the world of the students that there is no way they could help them.
The series is just as dark, as you can expect.

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I'm not a psychologist, but...

Boys and girls! If you meet a person like Gu Hai, run for your life! He has every feature of a toxic narcissist: he does not respect other people's boundaries, does not take "no" for an answer, tries to alienate his significant other from their friends, manipulates their family, stalks, sexually molests, tries to buy love with presents/favours, and does not refrain from crime and verbal/physical violence.
Boys and girls! If you are a person like Gu Hai, you need therapy. Seriously. Your destructive behaviour will only cause pain to people you care about.

Exceeds expectations

CAST
Both MLs are, in my opinion, insanely good looking, so I might not be objective, when I also praise their acting. They had a difficult task to show to us, viewers, that they are lovers, and at the same time to show the communist censors that they are just friends. They don't get to have much physical contact, so they are limited to the way they look at each other or the tone of voice, but with those limited means, they did a great job. Another great actor was the one cast as twins - he managed to create two characters of not only separate, but actually opposite personalities, one - lovable, the other - not so much. This must have been difficult too, and again, executed just perfectly.
MUSIC mostly matched the mood, but, as is often a problem in Asian dramas, sometimes was too invasive.
STORY
Here start spoilers!
***
At first, I thought that there would not be much of a plot outside of the game itself, but I didn't really mind. Each of the "doors", or levels of the game, had its own story, interestingly told, visually pleasing and emotionally moving. The actual premise seemed absurd: there is a game that kills people, some gamers can magically play it as a team and earn money, and when the MLs complete this game, it will be purged of evil, brought about, obviously, by the US (censors bless us!). Therefore, I just resigned to the idea that this show would be guilty pleasure - stupid but fun. The ending changed my perception completely!
This drama tells a story of a person, who was so lonely that he hallucinated a whole universum where he has love and friendship. People, who he saw around him and knew their names but never dared to talk to, in his hallucinations became teammates for life or foes to death. As for love - apparently, he never even fantasised about loving someone real, so he completely invented his lover without basing him on an existing person. His real-life friend, with whom he reportedly planned to create a game, turned out to be just one of his school colleagues, who he wasn't close to at all - he didn't even know what studies that guy had taken up and couldn't recall his face - the character in the hallucinations always wore a hood.
When he woke up after this imaginary experience of closeness and affection, he didn't even try to change and to be more outgoing, so that he could find closeness in real world. No, instead he dedicated his life to recreating his hallucinations in the form of a VR game. Gives you food for thought, gives you a picture of how secluded modern people are. Breaks your heart.
***
Here end spoilers.
To sum up, this show goes way beyond a gaming drama or a censored BL. It tackles real problems faced by all too many people in the modern world. I strongly recommend it.

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Sad story of a freelancer

If you want a light, funny, heartwarming movie, this is NOT one of those. The way this story is narrated is full of humour, as if it were a romantic comedy, but it's not. This is a poignant picture of a society where people do not work to live, but live to work, and can never be satisfied, because it seems that it's always possible to do their work better. We see companies sucking life out of freelancers and freelancers willing to give up their health and human relationships in order to keep the deadline. As a freelancer, I saw my younger self in a broken mirror. This movie should be a lesson to anyone: work might be your passion, but set your values straight and put yourself and people close to you above that.

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As addictive as heroine, but less toxic

If I had known that it was a remake of Addicted-Heroine, I wouldn't have started watching, because as much as I felt "addicted" to Addicted, I was able to see lots of things that were wrong in that series. I definitely didn't want to be taken on that ride again. If you fell the same, don't worry, Stay With Me isn't toxic like that. Actually, Stay With Me dropped the majority of all those numerous content warnings for Addicted, and I don't complain. For example, contrary to Addicted, this series shows that it's wrong to try to buy people's feelings and that it usually fails - which is an important message.
We all know about the communist censorship, so obviously there are no steamy scenes and the romantic aspect is more implied than shown. You can still guess pretty accurately the milestones of the relationship. Well, there are many shows with nicely executed NC scenes these days, so not every BL has to have them.
Besides, the way this large patchwork family is presented brings lots of diverse emotions, with Duoduo being world's cutest shipper for her geges and SuYu's mother painfully failing at her attempts to create a home.
If you loved Addicted and saw nothing wrong with that series, please give Stay With Me a chance nevertheless. Just treat it as a completely separate show, and you might enjoy it. I really hope so.

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Unique take on the BL genre

This series is a "must see" for every Thai BL lover, but I think that anyone can enjoy it too, because the story is quite unique and moving. When we meet the main character, he feels unhappy and his life is meaningless, even though he seemingly can have anything he could wish for. Dramatic events of one night set him on a completely new course. Guilt, redemption, hope, friendship, love, caring for others - you will find all these strong emotions, beautifully acted by the main and supporting cast.
I encourage you also to watch the BTS materials, to see how much effort and dedication was needed to film this series, so that we can enjoy magnificent landscapes of northern Thailand and immerse ourselves in the life of a small village by the mountains.
It'a a 10 from me.

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