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love how they made phoom look at peach and home as he reminisced about his long lost dead boyfriend.

episode 7 of PEACEFUL PROPERTY

“You’re complimenting me. What do you want in return?”

Wen - Moonlight Chicken - temp stuff. When will I get to be a permanent stuff? You just want to be my employee? What else can I be? Boyfriend. The seller's boyfriend. What did you say? It wasn't very clear. Clear enough now?

We've entered into the secon half of the series and an end to the torture is nowhere in sight. What is in sight however is gay shit so let's talk about it.

1

Let's get the biggest thing out of the way first. The show was very clearly asking us to draw a parallel between Home and Peach, and Phoom and Vicha. You know, actual, explicitly in gay love couple Phoom and Vicha.

Their story obviously resonates a lot for our boys. Here is Dr. Phoom, a man who - is kind of responsible for the death of the man he loved - had somewhat moved on with his life only to find out later that said man he loved had died because of him - is here now, even later still, to apologise for that to the man who died. If that's not something Home can relate to, I don't know what is. On the other side we have Vicha, who - was abandoned and left to die by the man he loved - was unable to hear that mans explanation because of his interfering family, that was more worried about reputation than his happiness, and because he was in the moment too overwhelmed by the betrayal to give him a chance to explain. Which clearly mirrors Peach's story. (Thers's also the parallel of the class difference as Phoom seems to be at least middle, likely upper middle class by birth while Vicha seems to have lived at the dance school which would imply him to be the instructor's son or an orphan/otherwise family-less kid the instructer took in. Either way he was certainly not rich.) (And I guess Vicha knowing more about cooking than Phoom is also a parallel and also another indication of their different economic backgrounds.)

Dr. Phoom apologises for not being brave enough to tell Vicha what he wanted to tell him (which was also Home's problem)

And then Dr. Phoom finds out Vicha finally heard his apology but he's still sticking around and he says that's enough for him which prompts Home to look at Peach (again) because that is kind of what he hopes for. That he gets to properly apologise to Peach and that Peach will still be around afterwards.

Just like Dr. Poom he doesn't want to exocise his ghost, he wants to talk to him.

2

Home fully acknowledges Pangpang as his baby sister (in law) in his contacts.

3

Pangpang's viewers are devastated at their ship having sunk.

4

They're being annoying talking by way of Pangpang even though they stand right next to each other. Which is also a classic trope for fighting couples (though it does admittedly also get used for friends sometimes)

5

Fully adult man Dr. Phoom knows a lover's quarrel when he sees one.

6

Peach knows that to facilitate communication between two lovers he needs to at least somewhat communicate with his own.

7

For some reason their solution is to cosplay as dance students. And then they, of course, proceed to look at each other while making the "love" gesture.

We had previously seen Vicha do the same.

Looking at them doing that prompted Dr. Phoom to think of his own young love. He has definitely clocked what's going on here (though obviously he has more important things to worry about than some strangers relationship problems)

8

Now this is certainly not something you'd say if the end goal was friendship

9

Peach is using the same pic for Home's contact as Home is using for his, just zoomed in on a different place. And he has Home saved as DANGER DO NOT ANSWER! They're so annoying.

10

Pangpang is very happy her parents might be getting back together

11

Meanwhile Home is sitting at a bar, crying about calling Peach like he got dumped. (Which he did. For good reason.)

12

We've seen so far that the ghosts are very limited. They are not fully concious and aware beings, rather they are "caught" in their desires at the moment of their death, they pretty much move solely with the goal of fulfilling their last wish. More like a broken record stuck in a loop than a living being that has multiple options to act and react to whatever happens around it.

It is noteworthy therefore that Home's ghost continued his journey to Peach as that makes this his biggest desire at the moment he fell into a coma.

Unfortunately it seems that he can't speak. Although Peach wouldn't be able to hear him anyway, so maybe all he wanted was to see Peach one more time. We'll see next episode how similar or not Home's ghost is to the others since Home is not completely dead. For now the biggest difference is that he still looks normal.

No Lesbian Corner this week because they didn't interact. Kan was gone being shady for most of the episode.

I wanted to clear a few things up regarding Home because I've seen quite a few people say he drank alcohol with his uncle or was "drunk driving."

Because he absolutely did NOT drink a drop of alcohol that night (or any other time, for that matter).

After his uncle poured Home some booze...

... it stayed between them with the same amount of alcohol still in the glass.

Home hadn't touched a drop of it.

There's also the dead giveaway in the next ep preview, of course:

Not only that, but the show has made it a point that Home doesn't drink and hasn't even before he hit Peach with his car (he even went so far as to pretend he was drinking in front of his party friends)

Like, this man really be out here throwin' drinks over his shoulder in order not to have to consume alcohol while at the same time trying to not lose face in front of his "buddies" and "baby nr. 13"

Anyways, this is all to say I have no idea where some people got the impression that he was drunk when he sat behind the wheel, but he was very much sober. Hope this post explains it.

I bet Home is here to win you back.

PEACEFUL PROPERTY (2024) dir. Dome Jarupat Kannula

Something's so so fishy about this. even if we disregard the extra info from the preview.

not just that Home doesn't drink, and doesn't normally drive

But. The paramedic that called? Asked "is this K' Peach"

"your number is the last one your friend called"

but Home doesn't have Peach's number in his phone under his name

much less that they're friends -- he's got his job description in there

We were SHOWN he doesn't have Peach's number in his phone under his name

What is going on????

Peaceful Property went ahead and picked one of my special interests to explore this week. For queer history nerds like me, some of the most prominent questions in the field are whether and how to connect to those in the past who did not have the same conditions and language for queerness as we do in the present.* Forcebook gave us two characters, Phoom and Vicha, who failed to name or live their queer feelings in the past. Instead, they had queer gestures to offer across time. What do these queer gestures and failures offer to the main conflict between Peach and Home, and what do they offer to us as an audience debating whether Peaceful Property is a BL or queer-baiting?

That ghost story spanned and blurred time into a time immemorial. Using the venue of Thai traditional dancing gave the story a sense of deep Thai history and traditions that are kept up to the present, while Phoom's home indicated early twentieth century Western influences, and a television (alongside Phoom's age in the modern-day setting) suggested the beginning of the global information age of the 80s or 90s. Then Force and Book, finally getting the opportunity to show their true acting capacities (let Force be as queer, emotive, and silly as he is in his interviews, GMMTV!!!), took us on a heart-shattering journey that blended those eras together.

In front of the TV, Vicha teaches Phoom the gesture for love before they kiss. It's not a pronouncement, and no one's recording. It's just a movement between two men tucked away in a private place. Vicha records later, but he doesn't put it into words. He carves tallies into a tree waiting for Phoom to return. Then Phoom does, but he's so cold toward Vicha that the latter can't even bear to look as Phoom tries to explain his sadness through dance. Phoom's mother is looking on as Phoom repeats the the move to signify "saddened," in the face of the instructor's demands for "happy."

The dance is interspersed with scenes of Phoom's mother berating him for being "gay"--she uses the English word! and as @absolutebl explains that's important!--across a locked palatial door as Phoom collapses in tears. Edit: @lurkingteapot giving me the Thai language lesson in the notes to explain, “Phoom's mother does not use the English word for gay. she says มีลูกผิดเพศอย่างแก mii lûuk pìt pêet yâang gɛɛ, where the gɛɛ is a familiar term for "you" -- "to have a child who gets gender wrong, like you!" ("gets gender wrong" as in, directs affections/attraction at the wrong gender).”

With just one chance to return to the dance studio that she believes to be the cause of his queerness, all Phoom can do is subtly cue Vicha about his queer experiences through dance. Jose Esteban Munoz says in Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity,

"Queer dance is hard to catch, and it is meant to be hard to catch--it is supposed to slip through the fingers and comprehension of those who would use knowledge against us. But it matters and takes on a vast material weight for those of us who perform or draw important sustenance from performance. Rather than dematerialize, dance rematerializes. Dance, like energy, never disappears; it is simply transformed. Queer dance, after the live act, does not just expire. The ephemeral does not equal unmateriality. It is more nearly about another understanding of what matters. It matters to get lost in dance or to use dance to get lost: lost from the evidentiary logic of heterosexuality.

Phoom's mom, the representative of compulsory heterosexuality, watches on, but she either can't see the coded evidence, or she recognizes its ephemerality and bears it knowing its lack of impact. Even then, she ends Phoom's dance before Vicha can look up and see the queerness that might affirm his own queer feelings. Phoom fails to live as a representative of queerness, unable to resist the pressures of heterosexuality.

With Phoom locked away, Vicha can't bear the loneliness. Queer suicidality has been haunting Peaceful Properties since the first episode, and the reason Peach keeps his blinds closed in his apartment returned this episode if we didn't recall. But we've had other subtle references, too. Vicha's death, though, was visceral and vivid as he slit his wrists with the same tool he used to count down the days until the return of the person who could affirm his queer feelings. Then, he documented his feeling in poetry with blood. While, Phoom failed to materialize his queerness for others, Vicha could only materialize his queerness through tragedy.

Much of queer history and fiction has focused on these tragic queer figures. In fact, they've been quite productive political tools for advancing queer goals. In the past ten years or so, the culture has turned on tragic queer figures and their narratives, though. Emotionally, I feel like that's for the better, but there's a fine line I'm always attentive to between welcoming empowering histories and turning our backs on those who don't or can't achieve them. It's also a fine line between welcoming ensured happy endings for queer characters and refusing to engage with those creators past and present who use other narrative tools to explore queer themes.

Relatedly, using a branded pairing for Peaceful Property while not advertising it as a BL, nor committing to that status even by episode 7, seems intentionally designed to invite the conversations about whether its queer-baiting or a BL. It feels so old-school to engage in the kind of queer subtext reading that much of the fandom is doing currently. Sure, people do fantastically detailed metas about body language, color theory, and everything else you can think of for BL series. When queerness is not a given, however, the analysis of queer subtext serves the purpose of liberating the characters and the text from the binds and blinds of an otherwise heterosexual context.

There's a generosity in that work. It certainly can't erase the failures to fully live-out one's queerness, nor the problems and behavior that suffering and suppression can lead one to commit. However, sometimes you absolve people out of empathy rather than anything they do to make-up for their harm and futility. Sometimes people are transformed by that initial love, mercy, or understanding, whatever you want to call it, like the ghosts in the series finally being seen. The basic tenets of humanism, a philosophy so disruptive to the rigid class structures the show's simultaneously exploring, and Buddhism, the Thai beliefs which the show's been explicitly exorcising the ghosts with, depend on understanding people at that level, beneath the trappings of social status, symbols of wealth, and even language.

Peaceful Property has taken us on the journey for Home and Peach to understand each other at this level. They, like the audience, have been looking beneath the cloaks of class and patriarchal defensiveness that separate them for the meaningful ephemeral queer gestures that can offer them release from the endless cycles of grief and guilt they're stuck in. That the series keeps finding ways to find peace for these ghosts suggests that the we'll also find peace and love from the alienation haunting Peach and Home. They just need each other to perform that exorcism on their hearts.

*Thailand, specifically, is unique site for queer historians and anthropologists--like director P'Jojo!--because of this question. Its one of the few places that maintained a non-binary gender system into the present, whereas many others were suppressed by Christian colonial law or influence.

WHAT.

But also, the preview told me two things:

One, either uncle is way shadier than even I suspected or someone is mucking with Home's hospital records for reasons of their own.

Two, Home was like this:

about the thing with Peach without one drop of alcohol in his blood.

I love that the second he realized probably very shady uncle was listening he just started blubbering. Excellent.

Peach saying that he wants Home to beg him for forgiveness while cutting off contact, wanting him to come on his knees and plead with him but also refusing to speak to him in any capacity.

Home is so sad and tiny and desperate. He wants this so badly but he's never known exactly what to do or how to do it, how to ask forgiveness because he's never cared like this before. He's never had that family, that connection, no one but his grandfather.

And Peach still cares in his own way. Peach is just more hesitant to trust and much more willing to keep pushing. He has always had a loving family in Pang, even when things were rough. Home chose to be part of his family but Home is not all of his family.

Off at a private event for Birkenstock. Gun at Sretsis event.

Photographers of Off & Gun: ptat24 247withuuuu

“If I’m not Black, the Black you used to know, would you be okay with that?”

(This is the first time I’m not hearing any voices in Karan’s head. But I can still feel how he feels anyway.)

CHERRY MAGIC 30 ยังซิง (2023) dir. X Nuttapong Mongkolsawas

"Stay together for a long time!"

—I SAW YOU IN MY DREAM: You & I in Our Dream (Special)

—I SAW YOU IN MY DREAM: You & I in Our Dream (Special)

It’s not even the fact that Peach and Home looked at each other while signing “love” that gets me. It’s that Phoom saw them looking at each other and immediately associated it with his feelings for Vicha. He had been watching them fight like an old married couple all day and reached the only logical conclusion that they were in love. I can’t.

the gang + hugs of relief

seanwhite + backhug

so handsome 🥵🫶

this pic is so... boyfriend-y 🥰💚

“Don’t disappear on me again.”

besties who slay together... stay together 💅

all the shots of Peach clutching Home's arm because he's scared and looking like he's about to snuggle into his shoulder

[Peaceful Property, ep 3, 2024]