I have finally resurrected out of my Covid bed, where I have been languishing for the past week. As part of my convalescence, I finished reading the Murderbot books and also read the webtoon Who Can Define Popularity? which was the source text for both Blueming and Something’s Not Right, the latter of which I watched while sick. So naturally I’ve been thinking about how adaptations work and what makes a story translate well into a different medium. So I’m going to do a slightly different format this week and go through some of the things I’m watching with that in mind.
Sweet Tooth Good Dentist: Okay, I’m not up to date on this show, but I did see that Mark and Ohm were talking about disappointed they were with how the show has not done very well, which is so tremendously not their fault—I think there’s a lot to say about the decision to only put it on iQiyi, but there’s also a lot to the fact that it’s just a strange slice of life type show that was marketed as a slapstick romcom. And it is that in places, but largely that isn’t the genre.
I said this on Twitter, but the most appealing part of the show to me was how it kept circling back to their first date and showing us more of what happened on that day and why it was important to them. I do think that might have been the thing to focus on, because it got a little too in the weeds of its episodic conflicts—which, I comment a lot on how BLs that are adaptations need to think more in terms of how episodes pace out a story, but this was episodic in the way Jittirain tends to write her college stories, where she focuses a lot on the little things about university life and relies on the couple(s) to create the sense of overarching narrative.
And that works sometimes, especially when a couple is very push-pull, but it felt to me like the writers on this show couldn’t quite crack what was the kernel of heart to this story and so it feels pretty unfocused a lot of the time. It’s a story that needs a firmer narrative frame to set up stakes; even We Are, which is similarly kind of meandering and slice of life, has the ever-present payment agreement and the timeline of Peem submitting his new painting.
My Stubborn: To start on the adaptation side of things, I only know a few vague things about the book, but one thing I saw was that it gets a lot more into Jun and Sorn’s relationship when they were younger/kids (apparently Jun once put firecrackers in Sorn’s shoes) and while the actors’ dynamic and the things we’re told about them do let you assume that their dynamic was “prankster younger brother” and “uptight control freak friend,” it would be nice to actually be shown more of that. I kind of can see how it would get written out in the process of forming the show, but I do think it’s weaker for not having it.
On a similar note, the b & c couples are also very underwritten. We’re given a few lines to indicate something resembling a backstory, but neither of them are given any build, and the vibe is very, “This is for fans of the book.” Like, we don’t have any frame of reference for how long Tai has had a crush on Champ, or what they like about each other (which is maybe because Yoon is genuinely incapable of having chemistry with any other human being), and while I love the toxic yuri couple in theory, we’re also given very little context for their apparently fraught relationship. The lack of information and over reliance on nc/sexual tension to progress those storylines makes it feel cheap and unearned.
Compare that, again, to We Are, which has TanFang and ChainPun as pretty minor couples. We’re at the very least given a few episodes of Tan pursuing Fang so even if we don’t know why he likes Fang, we know that he’s earnest about it and we get the contrast of how simp-ish he is with how he behaves with his friends. The choice to then give a backstory reveal later is very Director New imo, but it works in part because we’ve gotten to see enough of their scenes that aren’t just sexual tension.
Chain and Pun are truly barely a couple, but they have scenes throughout the show where it’s clear they’re circling each other and even if we don’t get the level of development of the others (we don’t know when/why Chain fell for Pun), it matters less because the show at least gives us lots of scenes with the two of them before pulling the trigger.
I don’t know, I don’t think My Stubborn is a particularly good or deep show, and I honestly didn’t expect much from it to begin with, but it’s jarring how flat and pointless the b&c couple scenes feel. I shouldn’t be this bored by hot women engaging in toxic workplace sex!
I have a lot of other things to say, namely that there’s been some discourse about the dubcon nature of recent nc scenes which does have me like, you walked into the toxic yaoi show and are surprised that the yaoi is toxic? I do think that it feels like some kind of breaking point is coming though, and I don’t think the show necessarily wants you to think what they have is healthy, but again, it’s not a show that I am going to lay money on being thoughtful or deep. It might surprise me—it already has, largely because of the actors—but it in a lot of ways feels very classic toxic yaoi.
Pit Babe 2: I can’t believe I’m talking about this show in terms of adaptation, but this one is really interesting because, I’m going to be real with you, they had almost nothing to work with from the first book. Most of the plot happens in the last 5ish chapters and the rest is largely porn. Most of the side characters are essentially nonentities or are just plot devices, and while I don’t think they managed to fully escape that with some of them in season 1, they did manage to pull a couple of compelling dynamics out of thin air.
The first one is of course Pete and Way, which maybe should have been elaborated on a bit in season 1 since the reveal from episode 4 of season 2—where Pete says he always knew who Way was, but Way didn’t know about him—was fucking bonkers and a really interesting note to their relationship, which was already more interesting than it had any right to be. And then there’s Pete and Kenta. Kenta is barely a character in the original novel—he has like 3 lines maybe? He definitely doesn’t have any backstory, and the way they fleshed him out is genuinely the most compelling thing from either season.
I was saying to a friend that in any just universe, PeteKenta would be the ship, because what do you mean they were both adopted and Pete was the favored son while Kenta was the pathetic son who never lived up to what he was supposed to be and they had a secret friendship and Kenta ended up devoted to their horrible father at the expense of others because he craved approval so bad and yet even so he couldn’t bring himself to hurt Pete. What do you mean that isn’t the endgame ship????
Like, I do think the choice to pair him with Kim (who I don’t think even exists in the book or is such a nonentity I forgot that he was there) was a great idea—they have the enemies to lovers aspect while Kim is also the most outside of the bullshit of everyone and so has the most perspective on how objectively insane everything is. Anyway, the way the Pete-Kenta-Way/Chris-Kim situation has been panning out is genuinely the most interesting and unique thing the show has going for me, and almost none of it is in the book.
Something’s Not Right: I was in the middle of watching this show when I went to look at its Viki rating and saw that it was under 9, which in Viki terms is pretty dire, and did some investigation which led me to discovering that it’s based on the same webtoon as Blueming, which is widely considered to be a masterpiece (I think it’s good but maybe overly artsy), but that also both diverge hard from the source material, which is probably part of the reason for the dislike.
The conceit of this show is that Ba Wu is sick of pining for his best friend Ji Hun and is like, I’m cutting off all contact, which sends Ji Hun into a spiral. Meanwhile, this young wannabe webtoon artist Ha Min misses the deadlines for all the webtoon competitions except for one about unrequited love, which he’s like, I don’t get it, why would you pine for someone? He ends up using Ba Wu for inspiration, thinking Ba Wu’s diary is a draft of a novel, and things spiral into a comedy of errors from there. I thought it was charming and fun, though if you’d asked me I would never have guessed it’s technically in the same universe of Blueming (different production companies, so presumably they could only get the rights to the side story, so no one from the original series appears).
Then I read the webtoon the two shows are based on and wow, they’re completely different. Some of the internal struggles for Siwon/Daon are similar, but the external conflict is completely different, and Ba Wu and Ji Hun are wildly different, with only their setup being largely the same. But the webtoon plot with Ha Min is, as far as I can tell, an invention for the show, and I can see why someone going into the show with a love for the webtoon would be put off by how it’s truly not the same story at all. (Middle school me and the Ella Enchanted movie.) It does hit a point where you can no longer truly claim something is an adaptation and should in honesty say it’s “inspired by,” and Something’s Not Right definitely falls in that area. (I haven’t watched Blueming in a while, but the characters are to my memory a little closer, but it does diverge wildly in tone and the set up for Daon’s character is very, very different, so…maybe that too.)
All of this is to say, I think there’s an art to adaptation. The biggest pitfall I think BL adaptations tend to hit is the impulse to adapt too directly or to keep tidbits in for fans of the novel without thinking of how to work it naturally into the narrative. They often don’t seem to think too hard about how episodes provide a natural pacing to a show.
One show I actually think is doing a pretty good job so far on the episode flow front is The Next Prince. Yes, they have a tendency to leave off on a fake cliffhanger (the scene isn’t usually resolved the same way a cliffhanger would be), but each episode so far has had a definite “here is the plot thing that needs to be accomplished this week” which is necessary for longform plot like this. (At some point I need to think more about the different ways of structuring and writing a tv show to really pin down how I would differ how this show accomplishes things versus, like, My Golden Blood.) This recent week was like we need to:
give more context for Charan outside of being Khanin’s guard and rescuer
follow up with Paytai and Ramil now that we know a little more about their situation (and oh my goodness, what an insane tasty relationship, the toxic yaoi is ALIVE and BUBBLING)
introduce Calvin and Jay
outline the shape of the royal competition and set up a timeline for it in addition to some further things Khanin needs to work for
Khanin needs to find a fencing coach and also needs to find an excuse to spend more time with Charan, for totally non horny reasons (I actually like how they’ve been clear that there’s a lot of overlapping reasons for why Khanin wants Charan around aside from wanting to fuck him; they’ve given Khanin way more depth than I expected)
I haven’t read the book, so I have no idea how much they’ve diverged or not, but they seem to have a pretty clear idea of what their plot threads are and are being more or less consistent with following them in every episode, which a lot of shows are…not good at. I think what I’m saying is that a lot of times I’ll come out of an episode of something and go, what were you trying to accomplish this week? And I don’t think they always think that way, they’re thinking of its place in the larger narrative and that’s fine except for how it’s an episodic media form.
Other Things I’m Watching
LoveSick 2024: Inching my way through this largely because I’ll be watching and suddenly remember how young Progress was when they filmed this (not to mention the actor who plays Mick) and get stressed out. Like yes, they are playing characters close-ish to their real age, but that’s a baby. At least I’m not the only one who is stressed out by how young he is; I keep getting pushed the clip of GMMTV Live House with New, Almond, and Progress where New says his age is the same as theirs combined and then looks like he wants to die. Same, bro.
The Ex-Morning: We were watching the first episode and it had me wondering if one of the rewrites they had to do involved making Phi less of a total asshole and having Tae bait him into making himself a pariah, because it did seem like Phi, while still often rancid, was more of a pathetic wet cat of a man than in the original trailer.
Anyway, this show is agonizing—we know so little about what happened between them, but we do know they still care very deeply about each other, especially Tam for Phi. Singto is such a good yearner; the way he keeps gazing at Krist makes me want to claw my eyes out. I am being gaslit by how they keep bottom-coding Krist and top-coding Singto—if they try to convince me that grown-up Tam is a bottom (I would buy college Tam maybe) I’ll simply have to ignore it the way almost all of SOTUS fandom ignored them telling us Arthit was the top.
This show, incidentally, is a good example of how I think episodes should work in a longer form narrative. Episodes 1 and 2 both had a clear objective (1 was setting up the situation and getting Tam back to Thailand, 2 was getting their show going and drawing parallels to their past) and still fed into the larger narrative.
Boys in Love: I don’t know what to say about this show anymore except that I really love it. I enjoyed that the anxiety this week was a combination of Shane being unsure of being Out as well as being insecure about his ability to act like he’s in a couple (and who can blame him, when his one example is Kim and Mon, the most annoying couple alive). I don’t know if they deliberately wrote Shane as having an anxiety disorder, but it’s very how he reads, and I think Mick has been doing a great job portraying it for a rookie actor.
I have a guess that Kim and Mon are going to hit a point where Mon gets pissed that Kim is deferring to Mon’s mom on things. It’s a unique conflict to aim for, and I’m interested to see if we’ll get anything of Kim’s family for contrast, since he’s the only one of the main four whose home we haven’t seen.
Podd and Papang have been killing it as the hag yaoi of the show, and I found this week actually really moving. When Tan was talking about how different it was for them to go to high school 12-ish years ago and how he felt like he lost his teen years, I felt like it was such a relatable feeling for older queer people who didn’t have a high school environment that let them live as freely as, potentially now. It was handled with a light touch, which makes sense for a show as lighthearted as this, but it was still nice to see discussed, and I’m hoping some aspect of it comes back.
One last note on Paul, who has been an absolute scene-stealer as Tar—he’s a complete delight and so funny. I’m not sure how they’re doing it, but despite fitting the usual incidental comic relief friend role, he doesn’t feel incidental (maybe because he keeps propelling events). I’m looking forward to finding out what he and Per got up to in their Truth or Dare game.
Okay, that was a long-ass letter, so I’m going to call it there. Rest assured that I can talk more about adaptations and television structure, and that you got off lucky with only this much.
urs,
hk