Wouldn't recommend this show to my worst enemy

I’m not going to lie, this show completely sucks. I’ve watched a lot of BL in my time and I’ve watched all the other HIStory series and HIStory 3 may well be one of my favorite dramas of all time, which is why I was so excited when I saw they’d released the next series.

I know the two shows have nothing to do with each other but I was excited about the continuing improvements the show had been making as well as the narrative complexity and maturity of 3 so I wanted to see where this series took it.

I think in every sense this show was a giant step back for the franchise. Leaving aside the fact that the plot felt lifted straight out of a c-list BL manga (seriously, some scenes felt so much like shot for shot recreations of common BL tropes I had to look to see if this was an adaptation of something), or the fact that every single acting choice made by the guy playing Li Cheng grated on my very soul, or the fact that they could not apparently find even a single outfit that would correctly fit Teng Mu’s actor, there is looming over all of it the abject horror of yet another stepsiblings plot line, this one featuring a super concerning age gap, literal stalking and of course sexual assault that is not only played off as a romantic stepping stone but is explicitly depicted in an erotic way in the show.

I hate with my whole entire soul the fact that this show for some absolutely unknowable reason chose to tie together the plot lines about coming out of the closet and being accepted by your parents (something the vast majority of BLs just gloss over completely) to the couple that is literally a guy who wants to sleep with his much younger step sibling. The writers of this show looked at the possible problematic tropes that BLs so often contain and I do my best to overlook and just went right for the absolute most harmful, insidious ones.

I don’t think Teng Mu and Li Cheng’s storyline was that bad, like it was fine and if it had been a standalone I would have considered this show slightly disappointing but completely mediocre. The acting isn’t great and the back and forth is seriously exhausting but at least it’s well within the realm of universally accepted romance content. Everything else however, a disaster. I would actively warn people away from this series.

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total hidden gem! (also the youtube commenters are wrong)

Spoiler-free endorsement, aka please go watch this show immediately:

In general I find the (narrative) quality of GMMTV shows to be super hit or miss. It usually looks pretty good but they’ve put out some stuff I think is really interesting and moving, and also a lot of really weird boring romance content.

I’ve watched a bunch of the GMMTV shows at this point but I’d never heard of this one until I ran into a random review on here that convinced me to give it a try and I was totally hooked from minute one. The pace is quick and doesn’t drag or linger on random filler in between romance like a lot of other shows tend to do, the acting is really good, and the characters are really nuanced and complex. In general just a super satisfying tv show.

The show this reminds me the most of is Veronica Mars. I adore that show as well and they both have this similar aesthetic and this really unique thing where you know that things are probably going to go wrong for your protagonists but can’t help but want them to make it anyway, despite it all. In both shows, the heroes live in a dark, messy world that is trying to drag them down even as they try to escape. People are evil and do bad things, but it’s nearly always a result of circumstance and of those who hold power at the very top.

The romance:

I genuinely think the romance was the first time I’ve ever seen a poly romance played completely straight in a TV show? This show did a much better job than others of its kind dealing w the nuances of interpersonal relationships and leaving a lot of room for the ways in which identity and sexuality can be really complex.

I also just think Tay is a really really good actor and I would probably watch him read the back of a cereal box so I do think that was contributing. But his character was really good! I loved Dark Blue Kiss but I think he does an even better job with this character and his chemistry with the other two is super believable! It has a really soft, sentimental feeling without ever devolving into meaningless fluff.

Me being petty for 4 paragraphs:

Now: to be petty and address some of the (in my opinion undeserved) critiques I saw in the YouTube comments as I was watching, because I felt like people were watching a completely different show from me a lot of the time.

I saw a lot of comments about how people watching it didn’t like Neo and a lot of comments about how they felt that Shin’s character often felt left out of the main relationship, and that it was mainly Neo and Miw with Shin third wheeling. I will address these separately.

Neo. Ok maybe this comes down to personal preference but I thought his actions were completely understandable. I guess people thought he was rude to Shin but honestly for me I thought he was super kind to Shin and did a lot to mediate his relationship with Miw at first. I honestly thought it was great characterization and it really showed this super go along to get along, people pleasing attitude that Neo has. He makes a really good foil to Shin’s kind of neurotic insecurity for exactly that reason, and in the flashback you can see that’s exactly why Shin was drawn to him in the first place. Yeah he starts acting super insane after his brother gets murdered but I will be honest that made a lot of sense to me as a character beat. So I didn’t think he was any worse than anybody else in the show, and he had motivation to act the way he did even if it wasn’t always in the best interest of the other characters.

Shin getting left out. First off, I think his relationship with Neo gets way more airtime than Miw’s relationship with Neo. Like if anything it was more about that and Miw’s relationship w her ex than Neo and Miw’s relationship. I guess my read on this was more than Shin was creating this distance in the threesome himself because of his insecurity about his identity and circumstances. I thought it was super consistently done and relatable. Shin is shown to be insecure and somebody who is timid and overthinks things. He’s also shown to be extremely aware of how different the world he comes from is from Neo and Miw’s world. And I think throughout the show Neo especially, but Miw by the end as well, do a really good job bringing him in and telling him how much they care for him. Idk I know a lot of people leaving these comments just want to see a perfect happy ending but I thought the nuance was good.

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