Welcome to my Saturday blog post, where I give thoughts on dramas I’m watching, whether at the beginning, middle, or end. Whatever I want, because I’m petty that way.
This week, I finished recapping Pursuit of Jade with episodes 39-40. You can read my thoughts there, and my full, mostly spoiler-free review of the series is below.
I also recapped episodes 7-8 of The Prosecutor’s Proposal. They untangled a lot of the murder mystery while still having sexy times, which is impressive for a show with such short episodes.
For Funsies, I am sharing commentary on the latest BoatOat omegaverse nonsense, Knot, and MaxkyBas gamer nonsense, Be My Player Two, on my Patreon!
What did I watch this week?
There was no way I could get to everything ending this week, but I managed a few. Let’s start with something more of a public service announcement than a review:
Are the Sexy Buttocks Not Good? – えっちなお尻じゃダメですか？ – 2026
Recently aired everything-gap Japanese BL with 10 episodes.
A guy who wants to experience a prostate-induced orgasm meets a nice older gentleman who helps him achieve this goal. Romance ensues.
Here’s a link to the trailer in Japanese, because that’s what I could find.
The sexy buttocks were good
Considering the short-even-for-a-Japanese-drama episode length, there’s not a whole lot to say about this show that I didn’t say in my initial review.
Ultimately, there was just enough relationship conflict to keep our couple busy, but not to cause any stress. Nothing particularly meaningful or thought-provoking was attempted, so it didn’t force us to watch the characters cry for several episodes. It was light, fun, and shallow.
If you want to see a nice young man fairly non-graphically satisfy his prostate fantasies and find love in a fairly non-stressful way, this is here for you.
And now for something completely different:
My Summer of You – 君は夏のなか – 2026
Recently aired Japanese friends-to-lovers BL with 12 episodes.
Two young men bond over movies in High School, but one of them has a secret that will have long-lasting effects on their relationship.
Here’s a thing like a trailer and you can auto-translate to English and that’s the best I can do.
In Japan, everyone falls in love in high school
So we get to watch an infinite number of story variations based on that premise. Do they start a relationship then or wait until they’re adults? Does something tear them apart? Does one of them secretly have a crush on the other? Is one of them popular and the other unpopular?
In this show, we’ve got two young men who meet and bond over non-existent movies (a little more on that later) in high school. One of them is considered more attractive and popular, but that’s not the focus of the show. It’s more about their slowly growing closeness and the one guy’s secrets.
Minus the movies, this is one of the more standard set-ups to this kind of story, and I found the first half of the show Just Fine.
The second half, though, was more interesting. This show is on the higher-episode-count end for a JBL. Often, this means either dragging “are they together yet” out endlessly, OR, they get together, but some new person shows up to create conflict.
Without getting into specific spoilers, this show went in another direction by focusing on how some earlier problems never fully went away. Not in a way that dragged out the conflict and prevented the relationship from evolving. The relationship changed and grew, but our character discovered their earlier conflict didn’t get fixed in that one episode.
This feels VERY true to life, where things you thought you resolved and moved on from are just waiting to upset you all over again. You change, you grow, and you don’t, all at the same time.
And the way it was done felt serious and angsty, but not in a dramatic, exhausting way. It kept the Japanese, slice-of-life feel.
Some positives, some negatives
Last week I talked about horny teenagers, but we’re back to the land of un-horny teenagers with this show. Sex is lightly addressed, but it’s the typical, restrained, lips-just-touching kisses
Also, as far as I can tell, the movies they are obsessed with aren’t real. The show has several movie pilgrimages where they visit the locations from their favorite movies. This is a thing I’ve done, and I really liked how important these trips were for them and their relationship. It also took us to some beautiful locations, rather than trapping us at school with the characters.
And I get why the films needed to be fake, so they can show clips and match locations.
But. The movies don’t look good. They look like someone trying to make something look like an arthouse film, but not thinking about what that film would really be about. So, nonsense dialogue with soft lighting and slow motion. Some of them have Bad English. Between that and them never discussing any real films, that part of the show felt unreal to me.
These aren’t major complaints
A show rarely gets more interesting in the latter half for me. If it ended at episode 6, I probably wouldn’t recommend it as anything more than a standard, fell-in-love-in-high-school-romance.
But since it took an additional 6 episodes to develop and explore their relationship more in ways I don’t usually see, for me, this is an “I might watch it again” show.
And now for something ALSO completely different:
Pursuit of Jade – 逐玉 – 2026
Recently aired Chinese historical-ish BG with 40 episodes.
A pig-butcher in a small town finds a mysterious, beautiful, injured man and marries him. Romance ensues.
I like to take a break from the tropey-rhythms of BL for the tropey-rhythms of long, dramatic, semi-historical (as far as I can tell), Chinese dramas. Horses. Wars. Blood pouring from the mouth. All of that good stuff.
With this one, we have our second lead from all-time favorite Love Between Fairy and Devil, keeping big secrets from the nice person who saved his life.
I really liked the dynamics between our leads
Supposedly because of the special fighting style her father taught her, our lead Changyu has super strength. Despite being treated less-than-kindly by the villagers around her for reasons out of her control, she never abuses this strength. But she is very protective of the people she cares about.
That is a turn-on for our male lead, Yan Zheng. It also makes her the perfect strong, virtuous cdrama heroine. But that works for me too.
Yan Zheng, having been injured and betrayed and needing to keep his true identity secret, is totally entranced by this kind stranger who wants to take care of him. She insists on keeping him safe, feeding him, and providing for him, and he falls hard.
Changyu, meanwhile, has a type. She’s not the best at reading and writing, but she finds it exciting when a man can read and write. And recite poetry. Yan Zheng, whose secret identity involves a certain level of education, does it for her.
Unfortunately, I agree with the majority opinion about the overall plot
I’m sorry, I really try not to go with the crowd, but sometimes it just happens.
The best part of the show is the first third. Our pair lives in Changyu’s village, learns about each other, and builds a sweet relationship even though Yan Zheng keeps secrets.
After that, the show abruptly goes big, involving all the court politics, lying, scheming, and violent death that it hinted at in those earlier episodes.
But that’s not the real problem for me. The real problem is the romance gets lost in all the action. To the point where I’m not even sure when they really declared their love for each other.
It’s not that they aren’t in love or don’t have dramatic, romantic moments, but they seem to dance around the core issues of their relationship. It’s only about whether they love each other or not, without getting into their backstories or personalities or other things that would affect their relationship.
Since I’m here for romance more than power-battles, it felt lacking.
It also has the general problem of these censorship-episode-limited shows based on longer, epic stories. Some of the story arcs, and in particular the side characters and couples, feel edited down and confusing. We get montages of their backstories instead of seeing the arc of their relationship.
The second half of the story is still strong — for this kind of show
I’m pretty sure I’ve talked about it before, but thanks to how cdrama production and censorship work, cdrama endings can end up a confusing, rushed mess. If a production is told they can’t air the ending as is, they can’t get the actors and do reshoots. They just have to remove scenes and try to edit it to make it work. Often, it doesn’t.
The ending to this show is serviceable. A little underwhelming, with some obvious budget constraints in fight scenes that should have been more impressive. But it resolved everything in a way I understood. I wish it was stronger, but it was fine.
And they still managed to include some very swoony couple moments and some of the deeper scenes I wanted to see between them.
In the end, this is the kind of show I’m not feeling a strong urge to rewatch, but I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend to someone eager for shows in this genre. It’s better than most, but not amazing.
And if you aren’t sure if you want to commit the time to watching the whole thing, you can always check out my episode-by-episode recaps.
Leave a Reply