I'm going to be honest - I read too much about this series before I watched it to give an unbiased review. I read a lot of comments on the MDL page, I read comments on the YouTube videos and I read a lot of speculation about why this series went off the rails the way it apparently did.

After watching, I'm halfway convinced there was no other way it could go.

The whole premise of the plot was overturned in the first half of the series, leaving it nowhere to go. The story started as a fairly standard one in BL - Young man A (Tine) is being pursued by Young Man B (Green). Young Man A has no interest in B because he's interested in girls, not boys.

Which he declares multiple times an episode whilst also making a point to ogle girls he considers pretty and try to date them. Because he's not interested in boys. No sirree. Not at all.

Young Man C (Sarawat) just might be the exception. He's the traditionally masculine, very handsome and talented young man that A recruits to fake flirt with to drive B away. Young Man B, as is the case with most Thai BL's, has a high pitched voice and feminine mannerisms and is, well, a raging stereotype.

Kudos to this series, though, for avoiding the colourism usually present in Thai BL - B is as light skinned as the rest of them. Now if only one of the leads was darker skinned, it would've completely subverted the trope which would have been even better. Baby steps, I guess.

Then it turns out, as we find out about halfway through the series, that Green hasn't really been pursuing Tine seriously. He had recently broken up with his boyfriend Dim (the president of the university music club that Sarawat and Tine belong to) and was using Tine to make Dim jealous.

Now, if this had happened later in the series, it might have worked out better, but it happened so early that the series had about six episodes to try and fill in and the writers couldn't seem to figure out exactly what they wanted to do. They could have given a bit more time to the side couples, instead of wasting the acting talents of Frank and Drake by having them appear for five minutes every episode.

No, instead we get this mess that just irritated me.

Here's the thing: when Sarawat agrees to fake flirt with Tine to chase off Green, he declares he's going to actually flirt with Tine. And then he says he's not. And then he says he is. And then he says he was joking.

And it continues on like this for most of the episodes. Poor Tine, who you can see is beginning to develop feelings for Sarawat (even if he has Wei Wuxian levels of obliviousness about it), doesn't know whether he's coming or going because Sarawat is....well, tbh, I'm not sure what Sarawat is doing.

It *looks* like he's playing shitty mind games with Tine, but I suppose it could just be his insecurity over actually getting the chance to be with Tine.

Then we get to episode 12 and everything goes to hell-lite because Sarawat forgot himself and Tine's, for some reason, lost all his confidence. Has anyone seen that, by the way? It was around for about six or seven episodes and then slowly slunk away somewhere. If you do see it, send it back would you?

Tine catches Sarawat in an embrace (a very clearly one-sided one) with his "friend" Pam and jumps to conclusions and gets very upset and runs away and cries, and then runs outside (where it is now somehow night even though it was daylight five minutes ago) where he runs into Mil and collapses.

Sarawat comes along whilst Mil is bundling Tine into his car to take him to hospital and he forgets himself completely and doesn't just get into the car (which he would've done two episodes ago.) He doesn't visit Tine in hospital, (presumably because he's still forgetting himself) and ambushes Tine outside of it and *still* doesn't just get in the car before Mil drives Tine away.

The ending consists of Sarawat singing a song for Tine and asking him, in front of all the extras they could hire for this mess, if Tine trusts him again. It's the perfect setup for a kiss. No, really,. Since the end of episode 2, Sarawat has been the one doing all the flirting (and then denying that he's flirting but, you know, you have to have something to deny doing in the first place, so it *counts*) and Tine's been acting all shy and coy.

This would have been the perfect moment for Tine to initiate something. To take charge. To lean in and kiss Sarawat and then say his line. And does he do that? No. They re-unite, happy endings all round, and do they kiss after that? No. Sarawat has been obsessed with grabbing Tine's 'boobs' for the last 11 episodes so maybe he sneakily does that? Yeah, no.

These are the two most chaste young men I've ever seen on a drama series. "If you keep looking at me like that, I'll kiss you til you drop."

Yeah, right, Sarawat. You kissed him a grand total of: once.

And he didn't drop.

I guess double high-fives are the new kissing?

In summation (because this got really long and rant-y but I'm not sorry because this had the potential to be so bloody good and it was ruined) - don't bother. Bright and Win 's acting isn't bad, though they are outshone by Frank, Drake, Toptap and Mike, and the soundtrack is great, but this show got lost in adaptation and whoever wrote this should just stick to original material and not ruin any more books.

If I sound like a bitter old person, about this it's because I am.

Bah! Humbug!