I Just Keep Thinking About How Much Force Piseang Uses Both Times He's Expressed Any Of His Desire For

I just keep thinking about how much force Piseang uses both times he's expressed any of his desire for Kawi whether on purpose or on accident. He's been drunk and both times he's forced Kawi's hands, he's pulled his arms, he's wrestled with him and nearly or actually overpowered him.

Kawi is genuinely scared in the future instance and might also be genuinely scared the second time as well. Piseang is taller than him, stronger than him, richer than him... he is a real threat to Kawi on a physical level, on an emotional level and on a societal level.

Piseang not just challenges everything Kawi knows and assumes about himself but also frightens him in a way he's never experienced before.

He is thirty years old and a virgin, likely never kissed, who has spent twelve years pining after the girl he fell in love with in his first week at university. A deadend job, lost friends, loneliness that nothing touched, a heart filled with someone who honestly barely knew him...

And now Kawi has not only be given a second chance at all of that, he's doing that second chance while someone has, twice now, grabbed him, pinned his hands, and either kissed him or tried to kiss him.

(All of this while Kawi is slowly realizing that all the assumptions he made about his position and role in life aren't true and that all the issues he blamed on people around him and his own failure aren't their fault and aren't just a failure.)

But something has to change. Piseang can't keep scaring Kawi. Yes, he stopped this time. And I am grateful for it. That was very well done, especially his choice to find somewhere else to sleep and to finally be clear with Pear on something they both understood but still needed to be said.

Kawi needs to realize that chasing the dream he had of fitting perfectly into some imagined box isn't a dream or even a fantasy but a desperate coping mechanism. He still doesn't know Knot and the other seniors set him up, spied on him, and recorded him with Pear. He has no idea.

I want to love this show but I still have so many fears.

Be My Favorite is digging into concepts of masculinity to a degree I haven't seen in Thai BL before. Since episode 2 we've been seeing the contrast between the kind of man Kawi is and the kind he thinks he should be, and 3 and 4 have drawn a big highlighted circle around what, for simplicity, I'm going to call bro culture: the whole complex of male social behavior that includes competition, ritual humiliation, stark othering of women (both "chivalrous" and not), and a rugged, deflective response to pain.

I'm saying bro culture rather than toxic masculinity because only some elements of it are toxic, although they're so intermingled that it's hard to sift the toxic from the non. You have to work to create a bro culture without misogyny and homophobia - although a lot of BLs (Bad Buddy, for example) do exactly this. Be My Favorite isn't interested in doing that though: it is presenting bro culture unsanitized, and looking at how our two leads interact with it.

On the one hand we have Kawi, who has very clearly always failed to meet bro culture standards, and who still sees success in that sphere as something to aim for. And it's not that the bros reject him outright. Someone like Kawi is great to have around, because for everyone else it means never being at the bottom of the pack. It's not that Not and his group dislike Kawi or want to hurt him. If you asked them, they'd say in all sincerity that they're just trying to help him out. What they're actually doing is using him to affirm their own superior bro-ness: whether they're helping him or mocking him, he lets them feel that they're succeeding where he fails.

Pisaeng sees this much more clearly than Kawi does, hence his facepalm when Kawi tells the other guys he's a virgin. Pisaeng could succeed in bro culture: he could be top dog in that group if he wanted to. It's because he could succeed that he's able to see so clearly that he doesn't want to. When a prize looks hopelessly out of your reach, it's hard to see that it might be worthless.

Pisaeng is frustrated because he's seeing Kawi try so hard to achieve something Pisaeng has already rejected. Kawi is confused because he sees how easily Pisaeng succeeds by bro standards, and yet he's still lonely and discontent. He's always been attracted to Pisaeng (just look at how Pisaeng's introduction, in Kawi's pov, is framed) but he has chosen to interpret that through the bro lens of admiration and envy.

I think we're going to have to see Kawi make a conscious rejection of bro culture. Whether that comes about through his deepening friendships with Max and Pear, or through realizing his feelings for Pisaeng, at some point he's going to have to decide that that prize is not worth winning. I hope we see this, because it's rare for BLs to deal so directly with conflicting views of masculinity, and what being gay or bi means for a young man's sense of self.

Be My Favorite ep 3 thoughts

So,  I wrote up a whole thing in a chat message, and then decided to post it here because apparently I have thoughts on this show (which, well, I already knew)

I liked so, so many things about yesterday’s BMF, but most especially that Kawi is starting to show moments of awareness of the others around him. He’s been so focused on himself, what he wants, in the first two eps, that he has appeared almost completely oblivious to those around him, even Pear, beyond what he wants from them. He’s also been, in many ways, oblivious to his own reactions to the things around him, or if he is/becomes aware of them, he brushes them off if they don’t match what he expects.

While I can understand and empathize with his disappointment that Pear calls a friend (or… more than 1?) to their dinner, you can see that it does become more than just disappointment. He does recognize that friendship is likely going to be all that he gets, and he doesn’t push it by taking Pear up on her polite offer of a ride home. Is he disappointed? Yes. But, when he and Pear end up having lunch together, again he doesn’t really push for anything more, which sets him up neatly as a contrast to incel-in-training Not.

And while he was visibly unhappy about Not showing up wanting to talk to Pisaeng, and he may have misinterpreted what Pisaeng would have prefered, I don’t disagree with him removing himself from a third-wheel situation. He may not know their full history, but he does know that there is something there that isn’t for him, and as a fellow introvert, I would likely also remove myself from their interaction, though probably not as pissy as Kawi does it. And later, when Pear tells him about how Pisaeng is lonely, and that there had been some sort of fight between Pisaeng and Not and maybe the others as well, even though she doesn’t know (or at least, share) the details, Kawi does see an opportunity to maybe help. Is it selfish, because getting Pisaeng his friends back would make Kawi’s life easier by allowing himself more space after the kiss? Sure. But, Kawi also knows loneliness. And even as he is trying to reduce his own loneliness, he does take the opportunity to try to do the same for Pisaeng. He just completely lacked the context for WHY they were no longer friends, and so this effort backfired spectacularly. 

One of the things that really jumped out at me in their confrontation at the end was how quickly Kawi responded with “and unsafe” when Pisaeng asked him if he made Kawi uncomfortable. I feel like that was probably the most absolutely honest moment on Kawi’s part, and also the most likely response to be misinterpreted. It’s been all of what, a day? for Kawi since Pisaeng out of nowhere kissed him. We don’t know anything really about Kawi’s history before uni, or what has happened between uni and the wedding, but from what we’ve seen… he’s likely never even thought about being gay, or bi, or anything. He’s been so focused on Pear, for better or worse for like a decade, and his complete lack of social skills and social life probably means that if anyone else was ever possibly interested in him……. he didn’t notice? Or never interacted with the person in any way where it might eventually become obvious, just like we see that Pisaeng already saw him and liked him before they ever really interacted, but it is clear that Kawi had less than no idea before the kiss. So, Kawi has just been kissed, and he reacts badly and runs away, and then decides that that is too much for him to think about and he needs to withdraw himself from Pisaeng’s presence instead of (but also, accidentally, giving himself time to) dealing with it in the immediate (to him) aftermath. And he sees a chance to do that with Pisaeng and Not. If he can help patch things up with the two of them, *he* can get the space he desperately needs. Misguided, yes. Selfish, yes. Necessary, yes.

Misinterpreted?  Abso-fucking-lutely.  Pisaeng takes it the way anyone not in Kawi’s brain would take it - Pisaeng is a queer man who has spent the last few days deliberately inserting himself in Kawi’s life because he sees their interactions through his own, infatuated, rose-colored glasses when Kawi starts responding to him.  He has interpreted all of their interactions up to the moment at the lunch table as some form of flirting, not realizing until Kawi flat out tells him that Pisaeng’s “messing with you” isn’t funny, isn’t nice, is hurtful.  That I think is really the moment he starts to second guess himself, but even then, especially at the moment Kawi invites him for drinks, he doesn’t let himself see it as anything more than awkward flirting.  Kawi has gone from this quiet, loner person Pisaeng liked from afar to someone who has inserted himself into Pisaeng’s life, how else is he supposed to interpret it?  But… then Kawi says that he feels unsafe around Pisaeng.  And, well…  it’s not like there are a lot of positive outcomes for the gay community when the straights feel “unsafe” around them.  Maybe that isn’t what goes through Pisaeng’s mind, but that is DEFINITELY something that hit me hard.  Pisaeng doesn’t know that Kawi doesn’t really mean that he feels physically unsafe around him (and, well, maybe Kawi doesn’t quite realize this either?  Who knows), and is really more referring to emotional and mental safety.

And we do see Kawi… maybe not backtrack, exactly, but he doesn’t understand at all why Pisaeng reacted to his response the way he did.  This is what made me interpret the “and unsafe” as NOT meaning that Kawi felt physically unsafe around Pisaeng, but instead being more of the “he just doesn’t know how to deal with all the emotions and thoughts and reactions he had to kiss and it’s all so far outside his wheelhouse that he doesn’t even know where to BEGIN to process it so the best thing he can do is just… distance himself mentally AND physically from Pisaeng”.  He doesn’t understand what a supposedly completely heterosexual man telling a gay man that he feels unsafe around him could lead to in other circumstances.  I don’t see any of Kawi’s reactions in this episode (yes, even the pushing Pisaeng away hard enough that he hits his head) as homophobic or unreasonable.  He was just kissed against his will by a drunk man he has only ever interacted with over the course of… two days?  The drunk man isn’t really responding to him, and he’s so overwhelmed by it all and the time travel and everything that, like…  he just needs to get away.  

These two communicate in very different ways, and there have been a lot of assumptions on both sides, and a large lack of awareness on Kawi’s part.  But he is starting to realize that the others around him, Pear, Pisaeng, Max, Not, his father, are not NPCs in a video game that just do what he wants them to because he has a goal in mind.  He has spent so much time not realizing that he does, in fact, have an effect on the world and the people around him, that of course he isn’t going to be great at it when he finally starts to look away from himself.  He’s socially awkward, very aware of his standing among his peers, and overwhelmed.  He’s not a perfect, completely empathetic lead.  He’s an asshole, in a lot of ways, but an asshole who has potential to be better, if he can start paying more attention to the impact he has on the world and the people around him.  We see flashes of it, already, in ep 3, that we did not see in eps 1 and 2.    

I really like this show, a lot.  

The reason I find Shang Qinghua so fascinating is because his life is terrible and familiar

What little facts we learn about his pre transmigration life is:

1. He was estranged from both his parents as they were much more invested in their new families

2. Because of that it's implied he was neglected. We only know for sure that while his dad paid his tution and living expenses he often "forgot"

3. He ended up writing proclivity based on what the comments liked or disliked because he was pandoring as it was his main source of income and because of that

4. He deliberately farmed hate comments because that was still engagement

But what we can infer about his life from the other characters is so much more

Luo Binghe: Luo Binghe is constantly hurt as a child by adults and people in authority who should be taking care of him. So he has attachment issues, trust issues, and in the original novel ends up in a lot of meaningless heterosexual sexual encounters that are devoid of emotional depth but let him play caretaker and accept affection as shallow as it can be. He also spends a good portion of his existence in dreams

Luo Binghe is obviously a self insert power fantasy. Through him Shang Qinghua was able to get revenge on those who hurt him and be powerful. But because Shang Qinghua (who may or may not have known he was gay) was filling his novel, that he has once dreamed of being art, with sex to please a bunch of straight men...no wonder the sex was devoid of emotion and left Luo Binghe as fundamentally hollow inside unable to fill the void in his soul. Because while PIDW paid the bills it was emotionally unsatisfying to Shang Qinghua

Luo Binghe is also written to be manipulative and I think that's a dark version of Shang Qinghua's need to fill a role and be what people need of him

Which brings us to:

Yue Qingyuan: Yue Qingyuan always has a smile on his face and strives to be pleasant and to fix problems between other people even when he's rejected for it and he constantly is failing to reach those he really needs to. Too afraid to speak his truth even as he has a sword of Damocles hanging over his head

This is the the other side of Shang Qinghua's people pleasing. This is a child who feels he has to fix his parents divorce and feeling like it's his fault. This is Shang Qinghua never feeling good enough

Original Shen Qingqiu: Shen Qingqiu is able to be the petty spiteful bitch Shang Qinghua always wanted to be. Shang Qinghua in canon often mutters spiteful hate filled comments towards those who treat him bad but he doesn't often say it to anyone directly until the ascension. Because Shang Qinghua doesn't feel he can get away with it

Shen Qingqiu is also a conduit for the rage I'm sure Shang Qinghua has towards his half siblings. Those are ugly feelings that he can't express to the people in question. If you've been hurt and deprived and you see someone getting what you needed but never had, well it fills you with anger at the innocent party.

It's possible to swallow that rage down and recognise it's not the fault of the person recieving what you needed. But it's an ugly emotion that has to go somewhere. And I think all of Shang Qinghua's ugly feelings like that pre transmigration went to Shen Qingqiu

Shen Qingqiu can be spiteful and two faced and elegant and nasty in a way Shang Qinghua couldn't be. Which is why he had a complicated backstory

Mobei Jun: we know he's Shang Qinghua's ideal man. Both in what he's attracted to (whether he realises it or not when he wrote him) and what he wants to be

So what does that tell us?

It tells us Shang Qinghua wants to be strong and he wants to not feel

He wants to take the trauma of his childhood and close off from the pain he feels

He wants to be ice. He wants to be stoic and unbothered and strong enough that pain doesn't reach him

Now we know that Mobei Jun in SVSSS does have feelings he's just very bad at expressing them. But to Shang Qinghua he's endlessly cool and untouched and untroubled

We learn so little of Shang Qinghua directly but because he's author of the world and from ways he reacts to characters and situations we can infer so much

And he's so hurt and lonely and lacking in self worth

And yet the narrative doesn't get any kinder to him. Post transmigration he is bullied by the system and by his peers and by Mobei Jun and he's always fighting for survival

Because both lives have been about "smile, do what you're told, survive"

But his extras end with his ideal character protecting him, treating him kindly, and agreeing to make him noodles. And Shang Qinghua feels safe enough in that moment to be demanding and ask for what he wants!

And anyone who has been neglected and emotionally abused can tell you that asking for what you want is a big fucking deal

I will have been married 18 years this November and I still cannot tell my husband (who is great) what I would like for dinner half the time because in my head I am not allowed to ask for stuff (I'm working on it)

Shang Qinghua goes through so much shit (and we don't even learn his name from his first life)

But his happy ending is him finally asking for something for himself and getting what he asked for without complaint

And what he's asking for is what killed him

He's so interesting and I can't get over how much is there but hidden in the other characters

going back to taking tumblr seriously thank you very much. literally having to search for stuff here cuz of rate limit