Painful coming-of-age with frustrating characters

I found this film to be effectively frustrating. Going into this film with the mindset that it's less of a BL and more of a tragic/wistful nostalgic exploration of young boyish teenhood and the rampant ways toxic masculinity and ideas of what is 'normal' and/or 'acceptable' have stifled generations upon generations of queer(?) or potentially bicurious young men will help the viewer understand more about what this movie attempts but it's not made clear from the get-go.

The dynamic between Birdy and Jia-Han is always changing and hard to pin down in any reasonable way. Jia-Han is introduced as the more stoic, less outwardly queer individual who, for the first half, is made to seem by his peers as being under the influence of Birdy and that Birdy would 'gay' Jia-Han. Then this dynamic flips when Birdy actually flips the script and finds a girlfriend in Banban and then becomes very cold, almost as if he's an entirely different character. All of this happens in a en media res narrative structure where Jia-Han is in a violent distress that we aren't sure what the cause of is until we get there in the movie. There are moments of sweetness layered between a lot of meandering and almost schizophrenic scenes of the two boys clashing. Even the shower scene, which should've been the peak of the tension between the two, felt incredibly muted and stifling, although if you stick out to the end I guess that might've been the point but it still feels very unsatisfactory. This ambiguity then gets funneled into a far neater ending where we presume they just went on with their lives and then confess to each other in a painless way but they've already lived their lives and there's nothing to be done. Did anything even need to be done?

What I needed from this film was more structure, more of a sense of belonging to a certain place and more worldbuilding. Everything felt very disparate and disconnected and in the few scenes of coherence we have two men who want to love each other but from circumstance and writing, they are destined to never be together. I enjoyed the ambiguity that it ends on and that there isn't a succinct answer to what happens next, even though they neatly say that they did love each other, albeit only after 30 years of having entire lived experiences apart from each other. This movie is very relatable in that aspect but as a story I also had a hard time enjoying it or seeing any kind of satisfaction from the conflicts.

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I don't understand how people rate this highly

Borderline offensive in how terrible of a BL this is, incredibly toxic relationship with bad acting, no chemistry between leads, constant regurgitation of the same plot point of oblivious toxic lead ignoring the sensitive introvert who would otherwise keep love a secret forever. Incredibly exhausting show. Even the subplots of the far more interesting characters literally go nowhere and are rushed at the last second to have a yes/no answer as to whether they happen or not, most frustratingly seen in the HETERO romance subplot between Bone and his teacher in the GAY BL. There are so many better shows with actual chemistry that are rated lower than this. I'm struggling to see how this was made only in 2019, it's so archaic and toxic, and I don't even mind good, passionate toxicity if its written well and has context, as I greatly enjoyed Tharntype. Genuinely a very stale and infuriating show and I strongly urge anyone to not watch it because you could literally spend the time watching anything else.

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Too unserious to be the Euphoria of BL

I went into KinnPorsche with a lot of hype around the series after having watched a lot of BL and related media in 2021 when it was first getting rumored and made into reality having just finished amazing series like Until We Meet Again and Manner of Death. Those shows highlighted BL's growth as a genre and that was proof that some exceptional shows in the gay genre could exist and also have intrigue outside of the plot romance while also taking itself seriously. Unfortunately KinnPorsche did not live up those titles at all.

There are intense pacing issues and a distinct lack of -real- drama for quite literally the first five or six episodes, considering how the pilot introduces Kinn and Porsche and the (initial) pretense of why they are together; Kinn is the heir of the lead crime family in the area and needs a bodyguard in Porsche. So many episodes are spent in this 'training' arc that is very campy and there's quite literally nothing serious that happens until about five episodes in when Porsche is present for the 'teaching of a lesson' that goes haywire. Porsche is more of a sassy live in crush that throws quips around until the plot decides to get serious about 8+ episodes in and we have overlapping side stories finally bringing the forest from the trees together and reminding the audience of the overarching plot. Sprinkled scenes of intimacy held me in suspense and yes they were nice but I didn't think Kinn and Porsche's chemistry was that great, either, they are just very attractive guys but I didn't feel any chemistry beyond that. I wasn't hooked until the very last episode but felt like it took way too long to get a coherent overarching plot amounting to something and to get satisfying comeuppances from the various characters. Didn't like Vegas much and I kind of hated Pete and Vegas, it just seemed out of nowhere but I did enjoy Kim and Porchay, Porsche's younger brother.

There's a story about family and loyalty and deception in KinnPorsche but it takes too long to find itself and meanders drunkenly through campy arcs for way too long to then have to rely on tired tropes to deliver. KinnPorsche to me wasn't offensively bad, but I can't say I thought it was good, either. If there's something to takeaway, I enjoyed the fighting scenes in KP way more than any of the BL aspects.

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