Welcome to my weekly blog post where I give thoughts on dramas I’m watching but not recapping.
Finished my recapping of Oh No! Here Comes Trouble! this week. I can’t recommend this show enough, it’s a real gem. It makes you laugh and warms your heart!
This week I have an initial review of:
My Personal Weatherman – 体感予報 – 2023
Currently airing Japanese BL, I’m at 4 of 8 episodes.
An attractive, successful weatherman provides an erotic manga artist free room and board, in return for getting whatever he wants at home.
With that kind of set-up, I had to give the first episode a try but I wasn’t expecting much. The first episode didn’t thrill me but people online were talking about it enough that I kept going and got totally hooked. It’s this week’s new favorite.
So what turned me off? It’s your typical low-budget BL with a small cast, a small set of locations, and nothing particularly eye-catching about the production besides the handsome leads. I was afraid it wouldn’t be more than titillating interactions between the two of them.
That’s definitely a lot of it, but the show hits on two of my favorite things: the balance of power between two people in a relationship, and communication. Because while our erotic manga artist is seemingly under the control of the weatherman, that is not the entire story. And what these two characters are telling themselves and each other may not quite be the truth.
There’s not much plot here, but who needs plot. Each episode is about these two struggling to interact and understand one another as their relationship evolves.
In many ways, it reminds me of all-time-favorite Japanese-BL story My Beautiful Man, with its quirky characters, complicated communication issues, and unexpected power dynamics. If you liked that show, I think it’s worth giving this one a try. If you didn’t like that show, I’m guessing it’s not going to be your cup of tea. But hey, what do I know? You can always give it a try.
This week I finished:
Laws of Attraction – กฎแห่งรักดึงดูด – 2023
A recently aired Thai thriller-BL of 8 episodes.
An opportunistic immoral lawyer and a rigid do-gooder come together over a tragic case.
You can read my initial review here.
Ultimately watching this show felt like watching a friend embarrass themselves in public — and they are loving every moment of it.
The show’s ambitions were too large for its budget and runtime. There were some action scenes so cheaply put together that they were funny. The overall mystery and resolution will not leave you at the edge of your seat. There’s a sweet second couple that gets no time to develop their relationship. The bad guy is uninteresting and yells a lot.
But the show knows what it is, and leans into its absurdity at the right moments, and never takes things too seriously. There are some strangely elongated moments with flowers. There’s a musical sequence with Grandma that I’m still grappling with emotionally. Also, it puts Film Thanapat Kawila in some truly eye-catching shirts. If you watch to the end you will be seriously rewarded in that regard.
Part of me is sad that it couldn’t be something more amazing like To Sir, With Love, but at the same time, I did enjoy the bizarre ride.
So why watch it?
Again, if you want something outside the typical school/workplace romances that continue to dominate the BL landscape. (What is WITH all the workplace romances???) If you loved Film Thanapat Kawila and Jam Rachata Hampanont in To Sir, With Love and want to see them in very different roles and having fun with it. If you like stuff that is so bad it’s good. For any of those reasons, give it a try.
I also finished:
Miraculous Brothers – 기적의 형제 – 2023
A recently aired Korean supernatural-thriller bromance with 16 episodes.
A struggling, unpublished author’s entire life is upended when a young man with an unpublished manuscript literally appears in front of his car.
You can read my initial review here.
Now that I’ve finished it, my feelings about this show are mixed.
On the negative side, there wasn’t enough meaningful time spent with the Miraculous Brothers and the other main male lead. There were a few episodes where they seemed to wait around while every other character on the show ran around doing everything.
In particular, there were a lot of scenes with bad guys who were so awful that spending time with them was also awful. There were also minor characters set up earlier on that didn’t connect to anything later in the story. Time spent on those things could have been spent deepening and fleshing out other, more interesting parts of the story.
On the positive side, the ending wasn’t the massive tangle of dangling loose ends that I was afraid it would be. There were things left dangling, but all the big stuff got resolved and I found how it was resolved interesting and different.
That is really the main selling point of this show, it was different and interesting. It took a murder mystery and added a timey-wimey aspect, a young man with supernatural powers, a cult, an author publishing a book that isn’t his, corruption, strong bromance, more spoilery stuff I can’t share, and threw it together.
But that’s a lot to balance, and at the end of the day the way it was balanced left me unsatisfied. I wanted more of certain things, less of others.
So I’m giving it a lukewarm recommendation. I can see myself suggesting it to people with a certain taste for bromance and weird mysteries, but it’s not on the top of my list to recommend otherwise.