welcome to vegas baby

I will start out by saying that I Really truly wish i could have enjoyed this show! it has a lot of potential and a never before seen budget for a bl. most of the actors are good/ok which is truly a miracle and i was actually interested in some parts of the plot. all that being said it is also impossible to ignore that this is so clearly taken from an absolutely worthless source material that got really messy as they tried to adapt everything into something that actually made sense for a live action tv show. i was so excited to watch a mafia bl series because this trope is usually so poorly explored and going into this i didnt even think that it would be done in a completely ideal way in the first place but i really just thought that they would at least have the smallest amount of respect for the themes and topics addressed in the show. so let's get into this.

(EDIT: please when reading this keep in mind that i watched this series in a vacuum. i'm not a part of the kinnporsche fandom nor do i care for fandom fights. i simply wanted a good show that was promised but not delivered <3 this is 100% the opinions of a casual viewer so keep me out your crazy talk ok thanks lol)

kinn
my biggest issue. something that made it nearly impossible to keep watching this show. is that kinn is one of the worst characters that i’ve ever had the displeasure of knowing. theres nothing sexy about seeing a man being extremely unpleasant to everyone around him at all times and at about the third episode i already couldn’t stand to look at his face anymore. not only is he not nearly a decent person he’s also a horrible leader. i dont know why anyone in the show acts as if he’s in any way competent..? towards the end of the show half of his bodyguards had died of extremely preventable causes if only had kinn stopped to think for 2 seconds but all he knows is how to have sex and throw tantrums. he’s at his worst in those moments where he pretends to have a plan to solve everything and then he turns around and spends the entire episode doing nothing like in the whole mess with tawan. “ok so i will pretend that i believe tawan and arrest porsche!! and im absolutely not telling him about the plan ahead of time!! im very smart and intelligent” like WHAT IS YOUR PLAN HERE?? because i still dont even know??? this man sent thoughts and prayers to a life or death situation that involved his destitute ex and psychotic cousin. terrible person terrible man terrible leader. it actually physically pains me that no one made the slightest effort to give any depth to this character and make him more of a likeable anti hero with questionable morality. he can do bad things and still have qualities that would make me, as a viewer, interested in the character. i was expecting a smart mastermind mafia leader. but his character development was essentially going from “horrible person” to “dumb as rocks”. at the end of the show he was kind of useless for anything that didnt include showing up like a jumpscare every time porsche needed help with anything or just standing next to big windows while making childish dirty jokes. but you know how it is.

porsche
not much to say about this guy other than the fact that he’s just stupid. and he doesn’t have any values like he says he does. it made me go insane that kinn could do literally any terrible thing to him and everything would be automatically solved as soon as they kissed. i genuinely could not take a guess at anything that he was thinking at any moment and i was never convinced as to why he ended up liking kinn. extremely one dimensional character with no depth at all.

kinn AND porsche
i DO NOT understand how can they put together the main couple of the show with this absolutely hateable man and expect me to root for them. the amount of times that i was yelling at my computer screen for porsche to RUN AWAY from that place because i could not in any way support this couple. porsche is an ok guy! i like him alright! but sometimes it really seemed like his character motivation was just…"the script said so!" "we all know the main couple has to end up together!!" nothing he did seemed like it was a result of rational thoughts going through his head!! very frustrating and exhausting. i realized that this show did not take itself seriously right after kinn had done appalling horrible things to porsche while being completely sick and deranged to him and everything gets solved because… one day they get stuck in the middle of the woods…? and im supposed to be ok with this just because kinn had a few seconds where it seemed like he might have cared for porsche in the slightest even though it doesn’t make up for anything that he has done in any way shape or form?? towards the end of the show i had an undying urge to skip every kp scene because i simply was not interested. every interaction was cringy and had no chemistry and i was left there wondering why i was still watching this show if i could not stomach the main couple. but listen up! this is 100% the writers fault because how are you going to put together a couple composed of an insufferable man and a victim in a completely unbalanced bizarre dynamic. they either have scenes that are completely toxic or moments where the mood completely changes into a light-comedy, sugar-water tv show and at this point the mafia theme isn't even the main plot, it's mostly just a suggestion. i wouldnt even have a problem with a bit of comedy in this if it wasn't portrayed in the absolute most inconsistent and absurd way with the rest of the show.

unseriousness
i think >the< worst sin committed by this show is that it absolutely does not know how to identify the tone of each scene. sometimes the experience of watching an episode is so surreal that i really started to think that i was losing my mind at one point. i’ve been high before and i think the experience of being high makes more sense than the plot progression of most episodes. i know this because i watched one of the episodes with a hangover on a saturday right after coming back from a party on friday and i started to get genuinely worried that the effects of the weed might have been strong enough to carry over to the next day. but no. it really was just the plot of the episode that made absolutely no sense and i really thought i was losing my mind. unironically. the jokes being told at completely inappropriate moments about extremely disturbing topics. or scenes that didn’t even feel like they fit into the same show. and i wont even go into all of the actually serious topics that were dealt with in completely cheap and honestly OFFENSIVE ways because i dont want the word count of this review to go up to 200k.

welcome to vegas baby
so lets get into what really matters. vegas. what a great antagonist. every week he was the only thing that actually made me want to sit my ass down on a chair to watch this infernal show. he’s by far the most interesting character in this and all i wanted was to get more of him!!! we love an extremely corrupt unhinged manipulative character that does anything to get what he wants with absolutely no shame. and i like this so much because for the first time the writers were actually treating all the bad things he did as ACTUAL BAD THINGS! he’s an evil guy. he does evil things. and i was only rooting for him because this is a fucking MAFIA SHOW. if i wanted to watch kinnporsche’s horrible dates with absolutely no chemistry i would just put on any other random humdrum bl. but NO!! vegas and his plotlines actually made me consider the potential that this show had if it simply committed to a more serious mature dark tone thats actually worthy of the bloody mafia show that was promised. there’s something so special about these guards’ boss making sure that he fights alongside them. the episode that vegas goes out to do his little missions with porsche were my favorite parts because it was just A LITTLE TASTE of what could be an actually well executed mafia show… vegas killing people in cold blood negotiating with dealers setting up all his little plots and then going out to drink and celebrate!! its so good to see!! i feel like they lost so many opportunities in what they could have done with vegas. there were so many directions that they could have taken the plot in that would have been SO much better than what we got. even if we got it just as an exploration of what could happen. like if for one episode vegas took over. and we would be able to see a bit of what it would be like if vegas was in charge and how things would change. it would even be good for kinn’s character because we would be able to see him at his lowest which would end up humanizing him. and if they wanted to get a “happy ending” (HAPPY FOR WHO ?!) they could just make kinn taking back his family’s power and that would make him a more respectable leader. but as far as i know vegas has to fight for all that he has while kinn just sits on his throne and has never worked a day in his life. anyways! just one of many examples of something that i think could have fixed the mess of this plot. we’ll get there. i also love how they managed to make vegas the big bad villain crazy psychopath be someone thats actually so vulnerable. its in the small details like the fact that he is the big bad villain of the show but he genuinely really cares about his pet hedgehog. i love the trope of "evil guy is really close to a very small animal" to insinuate that he’s not as bad as we think. and oh my god bible absolutely gave his entire life to this performance you could see the vulnerability in his eyes in the scene that the hedgehog dies and in a bunch of scenes of him with pete or with his dad. and even the fact that we can see again that this big bad villain actually has all these deep messed up daddy issues that really hurt him on a very personal level and that actually a lot of the bad stuff he does are actually rooted back in the complex relationship that he has with his father. congratulations you’ve just perfectly humanized a corrupt character with questionable morals its really not that hard i dont know why they couldnt do it with kinn who’s just a completely perverse and evil guy for absolutely no reason. and i'm not saying any of this excuses anything that he did because it obviously doesn't, but it's just a further analysis on why i think vegas is the best written character in the show.

vegas and pete
yes. just yes. up to halfway through the show i was entirely convinced that nothing would be able to save it. and then this happened. like im completely aware of how sick their relationship is at first. i wasnt watching it like “awwwww how cute” because at no point were they trying to portray them in that way (like they did with kp). like for the love of god they kissed and a evil little horror song came on. THIS IS THE TYPE OF CONTENT THAT I’M LOOKING FOR IN A MAFIA SHOW. insane things going down. crazy insane psychotic traumatized people bonding through it all. i dont want ridiculous dates eating little pastries in the middle of the park. it makes me SICK that they weren’t the main couple. in what world does a well written couple with a set of extremely deep and interesting characters gets like THREE episodes to get sorted out. this isnt right. my theory is that there were 2 separate writer teams. one to write kinnporsche and another one to write vegaspete (they gave kimchay for a set of rabid lab rats to write. i wont even go into them because i’ll just waste my time.) the kinnporsche team did all the worst things a set of deranged humans could possibly think of as seen in the plotline of the show and then the vegaspete team got together and went "...okay now that we know all that can go wrong lets try to do this RIGHT." and they made an effort to deliver the only actually well written couple in this show. i honestly dont even know if they’re actually well written or if my brain is just gaslighting itself because i like vegas a lot and want to support anything he’s a part of. but i would say that its at least the only interesting couple that makes even a little bit of sense and it's a waste that it wasn't explored further.

vegas vs kinn
i think the reason as to why vegas works and kinn doesnt is exactly because they don’t try to make vegas look like a good guy with cheap jokes and they actually take anything seriously for the first time in the show when it comes to his character. i loved vegas’ role and the way that they never try to redeem him. and if one day they actually try to i just hope to god that its not like “oh vegas and pete got stuck in a tree house and solved all of their problems in 3 little conversations! now vegas is good and he’s kinn’s bestie. actually now he works at a local flowershop and does volunteer work” because that was kind of the vibe we got for kinn’s redemption and that’s exactly why it didn’t work. i just wanted this character to disappear the whole time. but anyways.

vegas’ dad
i dont have much to say other than the fact that i HATE when a tv show gets a single character to pile all the blame for everything that has even went wrong in the plot. vegas is a bad person? vegas’ dad’s fault! porsche’s mom died? vegas’ dad’s fault! kinn’s dad died? vegas’ dad’s fault! we’re being victims of climate change whose effects will become irreversible in about 10 years? vegas’ dad’s fault! be braver with your won characters. they can do bad things and still be likeable. this is so lazy.

finale
where do i even start with this. if there was a limit to the amount of times that a single person can handle seeing other people pointing guns and staring at each other melancholically for several uninterrupted minutes i would have reached this limit about 20 times already. absolutely unbearable and painful to watch. everyone had the opportunity to kill kinn but didn’t despite having a gun glued to his face. i really dont get it. what a fucking mess. and the worst part is them trying to tie together all the loose plotlines in a single episode like “oh yeah i forgot that we had things to explain lets leave absolutely everything for the last episode it’ll work out” and suddenly porsche’s mom is alive and kinn’s dad is dead but no wait he’s actually alive and no one knows what happened and nothing that we knew matters to begin with and FUCK the ENTIRE plot. it was actually offensive the way they finished off vegas’ arc by having him get shot by a completely random nameless man after having finally grasped some autonomy in his life just so that he would be mentioned later as an after thought to suggest that he’s still alive. and a post credit scene?? that was very cute by the way but i dont see the reason of it being post credit its almost like the writers dont want us to care about vegas so they just throw us a little bone like “go fetch!!!” what kind of disrespect do they have with their own character. which just happens to be the best character of the whole show. this show is full of plot holes also like why was the minor family just suddenly okay with being led by porsche?? they could just do that??? where are vegas and pete in all of this?? and macau?? i know that it looks like they might be setting up for a second season or a spin off but this shit left me so disappointed and now i have a head ache. let's do better next time <3

tl;dr
instead of a respectable mafia show we got a bunch of goofy plotlines with cheesy cheap childish dialogue and poorly tied together scenes. next time try not to make a show for 13 year olds with an 18+ rating just to include sex scenes lmao

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