skygiants | (no subject)

I haven't previously watched any Thai BL dramas, but a few weeks ago a friend came into my DMs and started giving me such a detailed and enthusiastic pitch for why I specifically should watch Bad Buddy that I ended up promising I would try it out. This turned out to be a great decision for me although perhaps less beneficial to

genarti, who has spent the last two weeks patiently putting up with me enthusiastically coming into the room to describe to her, in detail, what has been happening in every episode of Bad Buddy.

The trope is, ostensibly, rivals-to-lovers: the story begins when Pat and Pran meet at college, where they are, respectively, the freshman class presidents for the Engineering and Architecture departments, two disciplines which, as everyone knows, are as the Montagues and Capulets and constantly finding excuses to brawl against each other in the university streets. Desperate to prevent all of their extremely stupid friends from getting themselves expelled, Pat and Pran decide to put aside their enmity and pull a reverse parent trap: they exchange contact info and enter a secret conspiracy to ensure that their two groups of brawling idiots are never in the same place at the same time --

-- and also that their two groups of brawling idiots never learn that Pat and Pran already know each other, because of course this is not Pat and Pran's first meeting; in fact Pat and Pran's parents are next-door-neighbors who have spent every day of the past eighteen years fighting horribly over things like who hired away whose employee, who left their trash can on the other's property, and, of course, whose kid is doing better at school/sports/etc. As a result, the two kids spent their whole childhoods aggressively competing against each other, until Pran went off to a different district halfway through high school and gave both of them their very first but alas temporary break from constant one-upsmanship.

In other words, it's a double Romeo and Juliet with lower and sillier stakes: no one's life is threatened but everyone the protagonists know still hate each other for completely separate sets of unrelated reasons!

This is especially funny because it is very clearly a way for the showrunners to lean in on all the queer Forbidden Love tropes while also constantly holding up giant signs that read THIS ISN'T ABOUT HOMOPHOBIA IT'S ESCAPIST NONSENSE FUN WE PROMISE

Pran's parents: honey, whoever you want to bring home is totally okay by us. A girl or a guy is great as long as you're happy!
Pran: :D
Pran's parents: as long as it's not one of those horrible kids from next door lol
Pran: D:

Anyway. Montagues and Capulets aside, I actually want to switch gears from Romeo & Juliet and talk a little instead about Beatrice and Benedick. Pat & Pran do not have the exact energy but are definitely B&B-adjacent -- first of all, in that all the habitual patterns of their interactions are set firmly to Bickering and Bravado, but second and more important in that the bickering and bravado already have a huge weight of feeling and history behind them at the time that we enter the narrative. This is the thing, I think, that a lot of other variants on this style of snappy, outwardly antagonistic God I Hate That Person [I Do Not Hate That Person] miss: what makes Beatrice & Benedick work is that we have enough glimpses of context from the dialogue to know that they know each other extremely well, they've cared about each other in the past, and no matter how much they argue they do in fact still care about each other enormously in the present.

Likewise, the thing that makes Bad Buddy really fun, for me, is that the events of the show absolutely do not depict not the first time that Pat and Pran have gone from rivalry through cahootship to the realization that they are not only required by circumstance to be obsessed with each other but actually genuinely like each other as people -- this has all happened before, and ended badly. The show begins right after the only period of their life that they've spent not defining themselves against each other, so when they meet once again in a position of nonsense forced rivalship the tension between them has a really different weight to it: Pat is like 'hey, we missed our shot last time but we can do a speedrun! we have a chance to do this again! :D' while Pran, significantly more self-aware about the fact that what they achieved on the last go-round was not just Unfortunately Thwarted Friendship but Powerful Homoerotic Tension with a side of Miserable Romantic Pining, is like 'god I cannot believe that we are here again, constructing intricate rituals AGAIN.'

Other things I enjoyed about the show:

- Korapat Kirdpan, who plays Pran, has a really amazing array of 'I Am Being Hideously Punked By Fate' expressions
- Pat has a younger sister and the sibling dynamic is top tier; relatedly: there is a lesbian subplot!! does not get nearly as much screentime as the boys but it is as charming as the "hey! turns out we're both queer! hell YEAH" sibling relationship
- Romantic Getaways To The Zero-Waste Village Where We Romantically Celebrate Sustainable Living! Support Green Energy!
- expressing one's feelings through passionate shirtless xylophone solos!
- "I thought this year we could do a queer take on a classic for our school play!" "YEAAAahhhh!!! [crowd cheering]," Showrunners: Hey Have We Said Loudly Enough That This Show Is Not About Homophobia
- once the kids get together at around the halfway point, the show does genuinely one of the better jobs I've seen of telling a story about being in a functional relationship -- there's no lengthy separation or misunderstandings or third-act breakup [despite a couple of fakeouts], they have many external challenges as well as things they have different feelings about internally and it's not without conflict but under the layers of banter/bravado the leads work through their various obstacles with a deep affection and care for each other! which is simply very pleasant to watch!
- I thought the reveal of what lay behind the families' enmity was really good -- unexpected and genuinely significant enough to justify all the family feuding without actually tipping the show into darker territory -- and while I did roll my eyes a little when they were like 'well if our families don't approve we simply will go on having a Secret Relationship forever!,' I immediately unrolled them at the reveal that the families know perfectly well, because they are TERRIBLE at hiding it, and everyone has collectively just agreed to Politely Not Mention It and let the kids go on thinking their clever ruse is super effective

In other news, if anyone has recommendations for other romantical media that effectively leverage the ability to start the story of the leads' relationship in medias res a la Much Ado, I would love to hear about it!