A Legend Returns!

Takeda Kouhei (Old Fashion Cupcake) is back in BL-land this time leading Life in Smokey Blue, at his side is veteran actor Shibuya Kento.

Based on the BL manga by Hamada Komone.

Azuma Sakutaro (Takeda Kohei), a 38-year-old unemployed gay man, once worked as a top medical representative at a pharmaceutical company. However, once he reached his mid-thirties, his work performance began to decline. As people around him moved forward with their lives, either getting married or changing careers, he grew increasingly anxious that he alone was falling behind. Eventually, he made the decision to quit his job.

Now living with his older sister’s family, Azuma spends his days sleeping until noon and relieving stress by going out at night.
On one of these occasions, after meeting a man at a gay bar, he is nearly forced into a hotel against his will. At that moment, he is rescued by Kuji Shizuka (Shibuya Kento), a former colleague and rival from his days as an MR, with whom he once competed fiercely in sales.

Eight years have passed since their last encounter, which took place on the day Kuji left the company. His sharp-tongued sarcastic personality remains unchanged, but he now sports long, languid hair and works as a medical translator. The one-time relationship they buried eight years ago begins to stir once more after their sudden reunion.

Penned by Takahashi Natsuki and directed by Hiraki Maki, the duo is responsible for When It Rains, It Pours.

A YTV production (Countdown to Yes), premieres April 6, 2026.

everything coming full circle (2/2)

(Source)

SMDH. Speak on it, Gaga.

I had no idea that thai bl or anything like this existed until this week, and now I am snorting it up like lines of cocaine.

This all started when I googled “thai bl” after someone on a Heated Rivalry post commented about it. I had no fucking clue! I am sure there are other idiots like me who also have no idea this shit exists, so consider this a sign to google it.

No one talk to me, I am exactly where I want to be.

@odd-echoes, your tags! 💖

Only Friends: Dream On Character Rankings Episode 1

After Jojo n'en upset me with the ending of Only Friends I’m back here for only two reasons: Mix Sahaphap and an apology to Boston. I’m still pissed as hell, and I reserve the right to bail at any time. Here are the character rankings for ep 1!

1. Dean

I SAID I WAS HERE FOR MIX AND I DID NOT STUTTER. Dean is the kind of problem I’ve wanted to see Mix play for a long time: face of an angel and soul of a demon. His utter disregard for anything beyond his own desires and complete confidence in his ability to achieve those desires through sheer force of will…look, this is gonna blow up but it could be the most fun I’ve had with media in almost a year if the blow up is written well.

2. Raffy

HAHAHAHAHAAAAAAAAAAA. Oh I love the pathetic ones. When he tries to flirt with Jack over drinks and Jack looks at him stonefaced as he presses his cheek into Jack’s hand, I let out a cackle. HE’S NOT INTO YOU. Now will he become more into you because fucking you will upset both his ex AND the brother he seems to hate? Well let’s see.

3. Tua

Babygirl The Secret Sugar Daddy is really gonna lie and pay Arnold to do this play out of his own pocket so he can maybe smash. Unhinged. Lemme see it.

4. Rome

Propositioning a man in a bathroom not 30 seconds after your last hookup concluded and left said bathroom is certainly a CHOICE. Hooking up with the dude I’m pretty sure you KNOW has an insane crush on the brother nobody knows you’re related to who also hates you is diabolical work.

5. Jack’s date

Dean came in the house, apologised for cockblocking but did not leave, and then said ‘you’re replacing me with this?’. That man knows a demon when he sees one and has no interest in being dragged to hell. I respect it.

6. Jack

YOU LET YOUR EX BREAK UP YOUR POST-BREAKUP HOOKUP MID-MAKEOUT TO HOOK UP WITH SAID EX INSTEAD. MAN DOWN.

7. The Greek Chorus (Timmy and Pete)

I love both Soodyacht and Fluke VI (he is 6 right? I’ve lost track of the Flukes. He might be 5 since Gawin no longer goes by Fluke…correct me in the comments) and Timmy and Pete commenting on the shenanigans unfolding via goss sessions with all the characters could work really well here. We await.

8. Arnold

They didn’t give Arnold much to do in this intro other than be the object of Tua’s thirst, but I wait to see what is lurking under this seeming nice-guy surface.

the u.s. women’s hockey team should get to throw rocks at the u.s. men’s hockey team and also beat them with hammers and baseball bats i am so serious rn

I am truly disgusted by the US Men’s Olympic Hockey Team. I am so disappointed and saddened. The situation has given me a wake up call on how the men’s hockey community truly is. I am a big Minnesota Wild fan, but now I don’t know how to feel.

I am not going to sit here and try to defend these GROWN ADULT men as a teenager, but I will admit, I was a HUGE fan of some of these guys (NOT the Tkachuks) literally 36 hours ago and I was so inspired by them, especially Brock Faber, considering I am from and live in a place super close to where he is from and it is awesome to have someone like that. I looked up to them as a current student-athlete myself.

I knew how toxic the men’s hockey community was, but you always just hold out hope that the ones that you support and love aren’t like the others, but what else should I have expected? Men’s hockey, especially US men’s hockey, is full of misogynistic, homophobic, and racist people.

Them partying with Kash Patel, the director of the FBI, in the locker room is so gross. He was there on tax payer dollars. He should be investigating ICE, not drinking beer and popping champagne bottles with these hockey players. We have ICE Agents in the US, killing innocent people that are also citizens for no reason. The Minnesota players specifically should know this, as they have for sure driven past multiple protests against ICE while living in the state.

The biggest disappointment to me are the Hughes brothers. I mean, what more could I expect seeing as Quinn has been good friends with known Trump supporter Brady Tkachuk since they were teenagers. They will lose a lot of fans for this, considering that a lot of their fans are women and girls who have learned about them from TikTok. They have alienated the majority of their fanbase. Their mother, Ellen Hughes, is a trailblazer in women’s hockey. Women’s hockey was added to the winter olympics in 1998, which was after she won the 1992 IIHF Women’s World Championship. She would’ve been an olympian. Ellen has been outspoken as being anti-Trump since his first presidency in 2016. She most likely tried to raise her three sons the same way, but instead they decided to listen to their conservative teammates and become every other American white man because she’s a woman and obviously not equal to men. Ellen was on the Women’s Olympic Hockey Team staff that won the gold medal, yet they still laugh at Trump’s misogynistic “joke” that isn’t funny, that also applies to their own mother.

The women have outperformed men’s hockey in the Olympics since it was added. They have medaled at every single olympics since it was added (8 appearances). They have a total of three gold, four silver, and one bronze medal. The men have 12 medals in 25 appearances. The US women only allowed two goals in the seven games they played in the Olympic tournament, with five shut-outs. They scored a total of 33 goals throughout all seven games. That is an average of a little over 4 goals per game. To joke about and laugh at this team that supported you throughout your games and even did better than you is unbelievable to me. A lot of these men have wives, daughters, mothers, and sisters. Laughing at this “joke” is laughing at their expense.

I’m sorry to all of the non-conservative men in hockey that are being bunched into this group of people. If you want someone new in the NHL to support that doesn’t support these actions, I recommend Olen Zellweger, he unfollowed the men that made those comments and laughed in the locker room.

This is just a really saddening situation. We will find out more about what men are truly terrible tomorrow by who shows up at the State of the Union address. One player that we know for sure is going, at least as of now, is Zach Werenski. I Tkachuk brothers will also most likely be there, considering who they are and it is already known that they are proud Trump supporters. I can only hope that Brock Faber won’t show up, but you can only hope and I am ready to be disappointed. I know that men that don’t show up could just be quiet supporters trying to save themselves from bad press and more deserved backlash, but the men that do show up truly have no shame.

François Arnaud is the real GOAT.

and also with Hughes boys laughing at Trumps misogynistic joke, is gross on so many levels, they were laughing at the team they have friends on, a team they have praised multiple times and laughing at their mum and all the work she put in. They cared and worried more about impressing a pedo than their mum. Their mum was a standout on the US women’s team but never got to be an olympian because they didn’t HAVE a women’s Olympic hockey team. She missed out. Her sons got to live out her dream and then laughed at it.

At the end of the day, I truly just feel horrible for the USA women’s hockey team, who were reduced to a joke by the president of the very country they won a gold medal for and whose anthem they sang proudly with American flags draped around their shoulders. Who were laughed at by their fellow Olympians and hockey players. Who have worked just as hard (if not harder) than the men to get to the point, because after the last Winter Olympics, many of them didn’t even know if they would be able to continue playing professional hockey on account of being women!

But I am so fucking proud of them and I refuse to let their win be overshadowed by this absolute garbage. They are gold medalists and always will be!

i think every member of the usa women’s hockey team should be able to handpick a member of the men’s team to hunt with a crossbow and machete

all that time spent to try and figure out how burnout syndrome was going to resolved the AI issue between them only for them to just not resolve it.

They went back to each other after a year apart.

That’s it. Does this count as an open ending?

I guess the potential endless cycle of toxicity might be the point.

But then what about the AI?? Why use this series to make a point about AI and then just drop that theme when it’s convenient.

I apologize in advance for rambling here, but there are so many shows lately where I’m asking myself “what is the point?” and not in a snarky way, but in a genuine curious way. I appreciate that in the past two years, Thai BLs have significantly moved away from school settings, (while Japanese BLs are trying to give us sequels, Korean BLs are giving us verticals, and Taiwan is … Taiwan) but because of that, many of them can’t figure out what’s the point of the story because this is new narrative territory for BLs. Before, the point was two boys falling in love, but now, they are incorporating more genres and plots, yet struggling to blend them while keeping romance at the forefront.

Dare You to Death and Melody of Secrets are two that are going to catch strays here because they want the romance to be the main genre in a show clearly designed to be a mystery, and the shows are struggling finding a balance. I didn’t watch Goddess Bless You from Death or Khemjira because I don’t eff with los espookys, but I did see people’s complaints being that they didn’t have enough romance, so from my outside perspective, I think those shows committed to the mystery/ghost-story over romance, and people were not expecting that. The shows picked a point, and the point was solving the mystery which meant romance came second which is not the norm in BL Land. Sammon’s work (Manner of Death, Dead Friend Forever, Triage, Spare Me Your Mercy) is one of the only writers that comes to mind who consistently puts the romance dead last because she isn’t writing romance. Director/Producer Aof’s work also makes the romance a supporting element to his story, not the main point. I hate Last Twilight’s ending because it’s a story about disability until it isn’t, but all his stories have a point that isn’t just love.

So with Burnout Syndrome, The Next Prince, and even Peach Lover, the shows want to say something important, yet because it’s picking romance as the main point, it has to follow certain conventions that limit the shows’ ability to tell its story. Then we have Me and Thee which understood the point was love, so it made itself a romcom while incorporating elements from other genres very well. The only true issue with the show that many people had with the series was Aran and Tawan’s plot, which tried to be about something more than love in a show focused on love. The show even changed the plot from the novel, so this was really a show issue and not a novel one.

Strangely enough, I think Thai GLs are having an easier time making this transition to include more genres beyond romance because they never started strictly in school settings, so two girls falling in love was rarely the only point. Many of them were based on a plot that included a man as the big issue, and a man could be a stand-in for greed (capitalism), patriarchy, and oppressive structures, so now we have shows about women falling in love in jail and finding that balance between a drama and a romance (Clairebell). We have shows about body-switching that showcase external expectations while remaining a comedy (Queendom).

Basically, romance is hard to write, but Thai BLs got it down in school settings after a few fumbles in the early years, so now that it’s branching out beyond school, it’s struggling with navigating the new landscape.

It’s not looking pretty now in BL Land, but maybe in a few years, Japan can get the sequel down, and Thailand can blend genres easier.

Imma ‘yes and’ Petty here…

There’s a saying we use in my profession: 'what gets measured gets managed’. Essentially, if a change is noticed, if it’s rewarded, then the focus will be on the element that drove that change. Thai BL in particular is rewarded for creating 'moments’ now, clips you can put on TikTok devoid of context to make the girls (non gender specific) scream and spend money. If context (story) is no longer being rewarded, then context (story) is no longer gonna be important to the business people (because this is a business) making this stuff. Even the genre blend stuff that we’re seeing, a lot of it is mostly genre vibes around two Ken dolls smashing into each other. Khemjira broke through because it HAD a story, and the romance was central to that story. Me and Thee broke through because it made its romance the story. Thai BL used to do this a lot more and a lot better. Even when the shows were quote-unquote 'bad’, there was something there to hold onto in the story, something that the creator was trying to say. But the assembly line nature of a lot of the current landscape, focused on creating enough 10-30 second clips to trend and launch their investment property into the vertical sweet spot that is merch sales, concert tickets, appearance fees and product endorsement deals, has meant that the actual creative does fall by the wayside some. Look, there will always be a tension between art and commerce in television. Part of the enjoyment for me has always been seeing where the balances and trade offs are, but commerce is winning right now and it’s a little depressing.

As for Japan…man, who knows what the fuck is going on there. It’s harder to understand what’s happening from outside because Japan has never been terribly interested in international notice for its media products. No clue what’s driving this, but the wave of flop sequels to good shows is noticeable from space at this point. Does anybody know how this stuff is being received inside of Japan and can shed some light?

How ‘Heated Rivalry’ changed the game for Canadian TV

MY TROY AND HARRIS WILL BE ON SCREEN!!!!!

via Saturday Night Live

next show!!!

+ important addition

Hornbills are monogamous. When a hornbill finds its partner they will be together for the rest of their lifes.

#atotsrewatch2022 - Episode 4

If you loved HR and want another example of Jacob Tierney being a goddamn alchemist with hockey-centric stories, you should check out Shoresy. I was doubtful about it when it was announced - Shoresy’s only characterization in Letterkenny is “hilarious faceless trickster hockey spirit who pops out of nowhere to taunt you and ruin your day and then skates away to go fuck your mom (literally)”.

Jacob Tierney and Jared Keeso then proceed to shock the hell out of me by taking this one-note chaos-gremlin joke character and successfully making him the emotional center of a really thoughtful (but still really funny) show about turning a losing team around while coming to terms with the inevitable and fast-approaching end of one’s hockey career and living life after hockey.

I pounded out (heh) Shoresy as fast as I could, and am eagerly awaiting season five on Hulu. If anyone is actually curious about hockey culture after Heated Rivalry — this show is IT. Fantastic comedy. I guffawed through every moment.

Troy and Harris from Role model by Rachel Reid!

After coming back to my hockey yaoi era, I had a blast reading the the other books of the Game Changer series. Troy and Harris were my favourites so here’s a attempt at what I imagine they would look like! My favourite Sad man to happy man and apple affiliated happy man! They are so funny to me…

This is the cutest fucking thing!

A POWERFUL moment. Jesse Kortuem, a longtime semi-pro hockey player from Minnesota, came out publicly yesterday, inspired by Heated Rivalry.

(Source: Facebook)

(Source: Out Magazine)

Jesse Kortuem appeared on the Drew Barrymore Show today (I think it will air Thursday in the States) to talk about his coming out, and he received the loveliest message from the Shane-man himself, Hudson Williams:

(Source)

Hollanov gifs by @rozanovs

See. Not a fever dream.

ilya turning away when he cries / shane not letting him hide

I get annoyed when people are making posts that are shocked that Shane pulled Ilya. And like maybe, /maybe/, Shane locked down Ilya (there’s an argument that Ilya ‘domesticity kink’ Rosanov locked himself down as soon as he could get Shane to agree to it) but Shane did not pull Ilya, Ilya pulled Shane.

Canonically Shane is one of the hottest men in the world, he’s rich, he is at the top of his high intensity career, and he has the biggest saddest wettest most beautiful brown eyes out of anyone on the planet. The moment Ilya saw a scrap of interest he was arranging for them to be in a commercial and jerking off in the shower at him. Ilya watched this man fold his pants one (1) time and thought “well i gotta fuck him forever now”. Shane tried to say there wouldn’t be a next time and Ilya was like it’s too late, I’ve got your number, you’re never getting rid of me, if I annoy you enough you will come organize my socks as like a sex thing.

Back in my day there used to be a Mark Pakin in every Thai show you watched. Every show. Every genre. You’d turn on GMMTV and there he was—didn’t matter if it was a romantic drama or a cooking competition, he’d just be there, like some benevolent spirit haunting Thai lgbtq+ media. We didn’t question it. We just accepted it. That was the world we lived in. It was beautiful.

The year of the Mark Pakin Renaissance was the last consistently good year of Thai bl (for me).

‘Heated Rivalry’ has a fan in NHL commissioner Gary Bettman: ‘I binged it in one night’

🏳️‍🌈 NOW BRING BACK THE PRIDE JERSEYS. 🏳️‍🌈

We celebrate David Bowie, Freddie Mercury and Prince for their gender-nonconforming amazingness as we should, but let us not forget

Annie Lennox

Grace Jones

Sinead O‘Connor

Dolores O‘Riordan

Patti Smith

Tracy Chapman

Please add if you like, i do not own the photos

Big Mama Thornton (photo credit unknown)

Joan Jett (photo credited to Brad Elterman)

Pauline Black (photo credited to Ebet Roberts)

Meshell Ndegeocello (photo credited to Raymond Boyd)

Tanita Tikaram (photo credited to Bernard Weil)

K.D. Lang (Paul Natkin/Getty Images)

heated rivalry + text [2/?]

A POWERFUL moment. Jesse Kortuem, a longtime semi-pro hockey player from Minnesota, came out publicly yesterday, inspired by Heated Rivalry.

(Source: Facebook)

(Source: Out Magazine)

(Source)

SMDH. Speak on it, Gaga.

(Source)

SMDH. Speak on it, Gaga.

shane: mom…can you take three steps back please?

also shane at 4am in the morning:

shane: here’s how we safely come out in several years

ilya: