A commentary on FMVs

Hello, friends! More content from Bashful Bi today, and this time, it will be my opinion on BL FMVs, or fan-made music videos. Typically, BL FMVs portray the relationship between one (or sometimes more) couple(s) in a BL show through select scenes from that series, and they have a song playing as the scenes are shown, exactly like a music video. They're made by fans of the show and the couple, who are often amateur filmmakers, which occasionally leads to these kinds of video being taken down from YouTube for copyright reasons.

For me, FMVs posted on YouTube are the way I most commonly discover new shows to watch. I have my YouTube search history turned off on my account, because it got to the point where I was embarassed to lend any of my devices to other people when they needed to use that app. So, basically, to find new inspiration to watch a show, I type "bl fmvs" into the search bar, click on a random playlist or video that comes up, and allow the black hole of YouTube to do the rest. When the characters in an FMV pique my interest, I find the BL series name in the description, the video, or sometimes even the video comments, and search for it online to read its premise and reviews. If I'm still intrigued, I watch it, and then I review it here, and the process repeats itself.

FMVs are almost like trailers for a show, and some edits can look almost as professionally well done as an official teaser or an actual music video. Sure, some of the ones I've found look like someone just spliced together some of their favorite scenes in an iMovie template and overlayed some nice music, but others stand as 2-minute works of art. There are a lot of factors, in my opinion, that make an FMV enticing:

1. Music that matches the mood of the FMV. A sad ballad doesn't really vibe with a video centered on cutesy cuddling, and an upbeat song clashes with constant scenes of arguing. This seems pretty self-explanatory, but I've nonetheless encountered videos that have missed this mark.

2. Scenes cut to match the music. As a lifelong dancer and musician, it just bothers me when one scene cuts to another between rhythmic beats, or when cuts are made without regards to the music's meter. I get the feeling of trying to run with a backpack when that happens: my bouncing up and down as I run is out of sync with my backpack bouncing up and down on my back, which makes it harder to run quickly and efficiently. If you've studied physics, you'd know this is called wave interference; if you've ever had to run for a bus after school, you'd know it sucks like hell. Basically, cutting between scenes off of the rhythm of the music is wave interference between what I see and what I hear, and it sucks like hell. It's also mad dope when scenes cut on a downbeat--you'll know it if you see it.

3. A storyline within the FMV. This doesn't necessarily even have to be the actual storyline of the characters in the show, but some sort of logical development in the overarching order of the scenes. At least for me, I like to know what's happening between people--I'm not just here for the smut. While I could have easily typed "hot guys kissing," or something like that, into the YouTube search bar (remember, my search history is off), I typed "bl fmv" instead. I want things to make sense. Maybe that's why I'm a science major.

4. Good taste in the video filter. Too heavy of a filter draws too much attention away from the actual content of the FMV, which is ultimately what I'm here for. It's like slathering tons of makeup on your face for a driver's licence photo, and then being unrecognisable when you're pulled over. For me, beyond the aesthetic appeal, an FMV is a source of information for me to decide if I want to watch a show or not. However, I do understand that this can sometimes be utilized to mask the scenes from the algorithms used to detect the sharing of copyrighted materials on the internet, so I guess a heavy filter might be a necessary evil sometimes.

5. NOT NECESSARILY the goodness of the show or the characters' relationship. If any of you have ever heard the saying that "a film is made in post-production," it holds true for amateur video editing too. I've edited a little bit myself for various school projects, and the power you have even in basics like iMovie is incredible. You can cut up and color some seriously crappy footage into a fantastic finished product with very little actual knowledge or skill. The key is choosing and arranging scenes in a way that makes the show and the characters' relationship look good. As an FMV creator, you elect what you do and don't put into your video, as well as how. It's the viewer's choice whether to believe you or not.

Honestly, thought, many of these critera are more widely applicable to film in general, not just FMVs. I just looked through my notes from a film class I took at the very beginning of college, and the above list I randomly came up with just off the top of my head has quite a bit in common with them.

Anyway, if you're ever bored, I would definitely recommend hopping into a YouTube hole of BL FMVs. See if you agree with me. Better yet, find a good new show to watch!

Review: His, I Didn't Think I Would Fall In Love

Hello, friends! Bashful Bi is here again with a review of another not-so-popular BL show: His, I Didn't Think I Would Fall In Love. I'm not sure why this show isn't more out there, because it's really, really frickin good. So good that I went to lengths I never thought I would to actually watch the last episode.

Summary (official):

Nagisa is 17 years old and attends 2nd grade in high school. He is apart from his parents and lives alone in the seaside town of Fujisawa in Kanagawa. He is passionate about surfing and works at a bathhouse in a hostel on the island Enoshima linked to Fujisawa. Shun is the same age as Nagisa and visits Fujisawa for spring break. They meet and develop a relationship more than friendship. However, the surfing equipment store owner’s daughter, Chika, has been secretly in love with Nagisa.

My thoughts:

The first word that comes to mind when I think of this show is "beautiful." It's set in 2006 (or about that time--I can't remember exactly) in a small, beachside town where everyone knows each other, the teens go surfing, and everyone dresses in the most aesthetic clothing effortlessly. I don't know why, but I'm super, super in love with that early-ish 2000's intimate beachy setting. There is one gorgeous, gorgeous scene set on the roof of a building during a sunset, and the brilliant golds and oranges made me rewatch the scene several times just for the visual appeal of it. And the whole palatte of the ambience was even a sort of sandy color, too. I could talk about how much I love the whole setup all day. Consider me fully in love.

Besides the en pointe visuals, the actual characters and the storyline were epic, too. Nagisa, one of the main characters, had some pretty honest coversations about what it's like to realize and live with the fact that you're not straight that I definitely think would have been pretty shocking in 2006, when this is supposed to be set. I really appreciated that. Many BLs portray being gay as no big deal, and while I'm not denying that, for some people, it's not, for others, like me, it is. While I hope that societies worldwide continue to move towards normalizing not being straight, my reality with this matter was that everyone that ended up finding out I was bi was pretty shocked and initially a bit weird about it--exactly like what happened to Nagisa. While it's often times nice to pretend that the world is perfect and everyone will accept you no matter what, when too many show do, I feel like my story is missing in the media, and that feels bad. It was great to see my version of that narrative portrayed honestly in such a beautiful show.

Honest--an adjective that perfectly describes the show, even beyond the non-straight content. Chika's relationships with her parents was spot on with reality, and the main characters all interacted in ways typical of real teens, with no hyperbole or anything that I've never seen or done as a teen. It was refreshing to watch a show that seemed so real.

But let me tell you: the act of watching this show is not for the faint of heart, or faint of mind in technological savvy. I found only the first episode with English subs on a somewhat normal site after I realized the show was taken down from YouTube. I had to download the next three episodes separately from their English subs and find an app that compiles subs and video on Google Play to watch them. As for the last episode, 5, I'm pretty sure it literally does not exist for free on the internet with English subs (although you can get it for some amount of money on some person's Patreon (?) through the same weird-looking place you can find episodes 2-4). Somehow, I found that episode subbed in Hungarian on a random site, opened it on my laptop, and used Google Translate's real-time camera translator app on my phone to translate the Hungarian subs for a Japanese show into English, pausing the episode every five seconds when the translator got stuck. It was an absolutely wild ride, and it took twice as long to watch that episode than all the others. Oh, but it was so, so worth it. Yes, I adore this show that much.

This show has a sequel movie, where Nagisa and Shun have grown up, but I have not been able to find it on the internet anywhere, much less with English subs, thus far. If anyone wants to buy the DVD for me, let me know.

Lastly, Nagisa is gorgoeous. Do not try to change my mind.

SPOILERS:

The friendship between Chika and Ayo is absolute goals. Their "boy conversations" about both being jilted in the same way (#twinsies!) are probably the most realistic, but also the most funny (in retrospect) that I've ever seen on TV, BL show or not. They also remind me of me and my friends from high school. Gosh, I miss them!

Chika's parents and sex education... god, that was relatable. While the taboo that pervades our culture (or at least mine growing up) has definitely loosened compared to the past, it's still weird to talk about that stuff with your parents. Sure, my high school taught decent sex ed, and I talk about it whenever relevant with my peers, but, for me, any time this topic comes up with my parents I want to fall through the floor and disappear. Perhaps because my mom pretended that information did not exist until the end of high school, and then, all of a sudden, she began to give me unsolicited advice about sex at every possible opportunity, but regardless of why, the fact remains that it's weird. Chika's aggressive panic is understandable.

Shun is the most adorable human, and I love him. He doesn't talk very much and comes across as rather shy, but, somehow, he manages to be super expressive with just his eyes and opens up to Nagisa about his feelings in probably the cutest phrasing possible.

Ayo is probably the most mysterious character, at least in my eyes. It seems that everyone (except Shun, because he's just that sweet) sees her as nothing more than shy, but I feel like there's definitely much more to her than directly meets the eye, even to viewers. This is no dramatic irony--we're just as in the dark as to what goes on inside her head as the rest of the characters. I first noticed this when she dismissed her chuncky film camera as being only a decoy that she carries around as an accessory, and then used it to take pictures of Nagisa that she eventually developed, proving that she wasn't just clicking the button for fun. What was her motive for lying about whether or not it worked? And, when talking to Chika about the ironic twist of fate in which their crushes like each other, why did she say it was a comedy? Was she implying something more than bitter irony? And why was she taking acting classes, really?

This was one of the most vanilla BL shows I've ever seen--the only kiss was Nagisa awkwardly kissing Chika after being rejected by Shun (seriously, Nagisa, you can't just go around kissing people without explicit consent or at least a warning, and did you think about how used Chika would feel afterwards?!) But it didn't feel bland--they are high schoolers, after all, and my high school experience was nothing like Riverdale (see Chapter 27: The Hills Have Eyes), so it felt more genuine this way. And it was sweet enough without it.

Overall:

Rating? 10/10

Flavor? Vanilla

Watch again? Most likely, I just need to brace myself for the subtitle nightmare.

Recommend? YES! Good luck finding the subbed episodes though, unless you speak Hungarian.

A commentary on subtitles

Hello, friends! Bashful Bi is back with more opinions, and this time, I'm going to talk about one of the more general aspects that pervades many BL shows for international fans: subtitles, affectionately dubbed "subs."

I've heard many people complain that watching shows in a language foreign to them is difficult because they can't read the subs fast enough, or because they can't focus on what's actually happening behind the subs, or because they get just get tired of reading them. In my experience, none of these things are true if the subtitles are in a language you're fluent in. Let me explain, beginning with a disclaimer: this is my opinion. Please do not take this as a slight to anyone.

As a kid, I was a voracious reader who turned into an avid writer (if you can't tell, my vocabulary is definitely skewed towards a more bookish style, and this is why). It was the classic story of "shy kid finds solace in books"--I learned to read pretty early, and tended to try reading as fast as I could in order to find out what happened at the end of an interesting book as soon as possible. While I, like most young adults, have fallen off of the weekly-trips-to-the-library-to-get-a-million-books bandwagon because of my mounting schoolwork and other committments, I haven't lost my skills of reading at a fairly brisk pace. While I'm sure that comes in use when reading subs, I honestly don't think the words flicker that fast along the screen anyway, because characters on TV don't actually talk that fast most of the time and there's often pauses in between when they do. Maybe some people have trouble reading subs at the rate they usually go at for any number of reasons, but neither I, nor any of the people I know who also watch subbed shows have experienced substantial difficulty with this.

Perhaps the reason that I don't have issues focusing on both the subs and the on-screen action is because I always watch TV on my laptop, which has a fairly small screen, or sometimes even on my phone. My eyes never have to travel very far from the words to what's above them. Additionally, the auditory stimuli of the show augment what's happening on screen. Even if you aren't immediately in tune with the tonal differences that convey emotions in th language you're watching the show in, you quickly get accustomed to it. After all, both in personal experience as a trilingual person and according to scientific evidence (see this study), human noises are somewhat universal. It's easy to tell if someone is happy or angry, even if you can't understand what words they're saying. And, of course, background noise and the soundtrack help convey the mood and plot of a specific moment. Because my eyes don't have to move that much between the written subtitles and the characters on screen, and because the auditory aspect of a show helps set the stage of a scene, I never thought that subs got in the way of me actually watching a show.

Lastly, I personally have never gotten tired of reading the subs on a show I was truly interested in watching, and I've watched a lot of shows. If my eyes do start to hurt, it's probably because it's the wee hours of the morning, I'm not wearing my glasses, and my brain needs to sleep. In that case, it's not the show's or the subs' fault--it's mine (although I could blame the show for being too interesting to stop watching. Most of the time, that's what I do.) To be completely honest, the subs sometimes add an extra layer of enjoyment to the show. A notable example of this are subs by someone under the alias of PinkMilk, who subbed the first season of the show 2Moons. They would occasionally add hilarious commentary at the top of the screen, and, while those supertitles weren't essential to understanding the dialogue in the show, it felt less like I was watching TV alone in my apartment after a depressing day of Zoom University and more like a night in with a friend.

Often times, I think resistance towards watching shows in a foreign language, especially by English speakers, is based in the habit of mind that English is the primary global language and that everything should be accessible, with minimal effort, in that language. It's a habit of mind that has spurred abysmal, if any, second language education requirements in schools and universities all across the USA, as well as xenophobia in general. Stories of "you live in America, you should be speaking English!" are all too common among those using other languages in public, as well as irritation by those who speak only English when they go abroad and realize that *news flash* not everyone speaks English. The fact that English subs are available at all for so many great international shows is a huge blessing and an undeniable privilege already--complaining about reading subtitles becomes ungrateful at a certain point. No other language have as many shows subbed in it as English does, to my knowledge. Instead, we should use subtitles as an opportunity to 1) practice reading quickly (I promise it comes in use in higher education), and 2) embrace a different language and celebrate the global diversity it is indicative of.

Review: The Shipper

Hello, friends! Bashful Bi is here with my first review! I'll start off with a show that isn't reviewed very often (at least, to my knowledge): The Shipper. This could be because it just came out, because it wasn't widely publicized on YouTube, which many international BL fans use to watch shows, or because of another reason you can see below in SPOILERS.

Summary (official):

Pan and Soda, two fujoshi girls, like to imagine boy couples getting together. The two that they both like to partner up are two best friends in the school: Way, the cool athlete, and Kim, an outstanding student. Although, in truth, both know that the whole story is just a fantasy, because Way already has a girlfriend, PhingPhing, which irritates the two girls. 

One day, after almost causing Way to be expelled, Pan meets Kim, who volunteers to take Pan home, but both have their souls reaped due to an accident by the angel of death. After realizing that their time isn't that over, she sends their spirits back into their bodies. When waking up, Pan finds herself in the body of Kim from the mistakes of the angel of death. Meanwhile, Kim's soul in Pan's body is still not recovered. The angel of death promised to find a solution, but for now Pan has to stay in Kim's body. 

But being Kim is not easy at all. Even being near Way creates an awkward moment. In addition, the matter is even more difficult. Pan soon learned that Khet her friend in school is the real brother of Kim. This puts her in an even more awkward situation. However, she decides to use this as a chance to make her ship sail. Will Pan successfully get Way and Kim shipped? Or is it all too much for her?

My thoughts:

This show ended up not being anything I thought it would be going into it--and that's, ironically, a good thing. I thought the very beginning was really, really cringy, because both Pan and Soda were shown as the worst of female stereotypes: squealy, giggly, and silly. It seemed that the whole show would be just about that, and the only reason I didn't immediately stop watching it was because I was bored. I'm also not a huge fan of supernatural aspects in romance shows (Twilight ruined that for me a while ago), especially when they are presented as comedy the way it was in the show. It just makes my eyes roll and my fingers skip forward to the next scene. 

But the show then began taking a dive beyond high school stereotypes, and exploring the thoughts of the characters behind those actions, as well as their relationships behind the superficial. By the middle of the show, when I had watched all of the episodes released up to that moment, I was genuinely invested in the problems and goals of all of the characters, as well as their friendships and familial relations, and I couldn't wait for the next episode to come out! 

When the show was over, I realized that it's more accurate to categorize The Shipper as a show about true friendship than boys' love, and I was honestly completely fine with that. Yes, the romance aspect of it ended up being more interesting than I thought it would be going into it (I really thought this show was going to suck), but the other kinds of relationships were what really made me love this show. Some of the parent-child dynamics were also captivating to watch, and definitely resonated with me. 

This story wasn't just some ripoff of a wattpad-style novel a thirteen-year-old wrote after school, it was a portrayal of genuine affection in all its forms and facets.

SPOILERS:

PhingPhing was a serious bitch and that made me angry. Way, you deserve so much better! I disliked her from the moment I saw the way she looked at Way, and I absolutely hated her after about a few minutes. Seriously, imagine convincing your boyfriend to be in on your lying scheme about how far you've gone with him, and then hiring people to go after his best friend with a knife when things don't go your way?! What an absolute snake! Yeah, sometimes people just suck, but that doesn't mean I won't be mad about it.

The friendships between Kim and Way and between Pan and Soda exceeded any friendship I have ever seen in a BL show. Heck, any TV show. Being there for someone, even when no one is looking, is the epitome of loyalty and real love. Also, Way refusing to let his feelings for Kim get in the way of him being his friend struck a personal chord with me and really warmed my heart. And Khet... oh my god, I love him so, so much. He is all-around an amazing person, and if any of us have anyone half as good in our lives we should be overwhelmingly thankful. He deserves better than anything the scriptwriters could have given him.

Now, let's talk about the ending.

It made me want to scream, and cry, and throw myself out the window. What do you mean, Kim is dead?!!! That was -1000% satisfying, and I couldn't stand it. I want to be clear that I am a sucker for happy endings in BL shows--I watch these shows because I want to feel happy, and a ship not sailing because one of the guys is literally dead does not make the cut for that. Sure, Kim's death served as a lesson to be himself to Way and to act on his feelings to Khet, but it absolutely broke my heart. Guys, I sobbed genuine tears at 2am as they dripped onto my laptop keyboard when the angel of death said he was dead. This is going to seriously upset my rating for this show, and probably why most people aren't going to talk about it in the future.

But if anyone watched the unsubbed section after the credits of the last episode (I did because I was too busy blowing my nose to turn it off), you'll see that Kim, apparently, has unfinished business on Earth. Praying for a season 2, where he is resurrected (permanently)?

Overall:

Rating? 7/10 (lots of amazing things, one thing that absolutely broke me)

Flavor? Vanilla (there was literally one kiss)

Watch again? Maybe, but only if I brace myself for an emotional rollercoaster.

Recommend? Absolutely!

Introduction

Hello, everyone! My name is Kat Vitalia, but you can just call me the Bashful Bi because, well, that's who I am. Like many people, I love watching TV, and I've developed a specific liking to BL shows. Growing up, I never saw much representation of anyone not strictly straight, much less positive, normalized representation, so discovering a whole genre that caters towards filling that void for me has been pretty epic. Even though I don't speak the languages the characters in those shows do (I'm trilingual, but I guess I'm fluent in the wrong ones... oh well...), the universal human interactions, spot-on soundtracks, and of course the subtitles have rendered this genre extremely enjoyable to me.

I also love having opinions. Since I currently live alone, and will probably be living alone for the forseeable future because of COVID-19, I haven't had a chance to gush or complain about the shows I've watched. I figured a blog was the ideal solution to that. As I begin a new year at university, I begin this blog to share with you all my thoughts. Perhaps you'll find a recommendation for a show you really like. Perhaps you'll share one of my sentiments, or vehemently disagree. Perhaps you'll just enjoy reading reviews. Either way, enjoy!

--Bashful Bi