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Big Dragon thai drama review
Completed
Big Dragon
0 people found this review helpful
by HaiLuoYin
Jan 2, 2023
8 of 8 episodes seen
Completed
Overall 3.0
Story 1.5
Acting/Cast 5.5
Music 1.0
Rewatch Value 3.0
This review may contain spoilers

A relationship with as much depth as you'd get in a music video

After dropping this during the 1st episode out of disgust, I just binged episodes 2-8 and can barely remember what I watched. I only watched it because I've been seeing Mos and Bank all over social media and wondered if this ship was really worth all attention it's getting. It's not.

I'd love to list the strong points but there are only two. Mangkorn's mom is delightful and Bank does a commendable job carrying the entire series on his back once he started having more than 2 facial expressions.

The weak points are endless. There is no story, none of the characters are interesting and scenes often feel completely disconnected from each other. At first, I thought the casting director was the problem for picking amateur actors who weren't able to convincingly do the job. But as the series went on, it became clear that they were doing their best with a truly weak script. The direction is by far the biggest failure. The director seems to have not bothered to prepare the actors for their scenes and didn't explain to them the motivations of the characters. But worse than that, he shot scenes that should only exist in a flashy music video, not a tv series. The shot of Yai and Mangkorn as yin and yang with the red sheet may look cool in a trailer, but it had no place in the episode. But the editing isn't much better. The editor just threw scenes together to fit into 8 boring aimless episodes. So many scenes just exist before or after other scenes and there is little continuity in each episode. I wouldn't be surprised if the editor just forget to include all of the scenes that should have happened in the middle where Yai and Mangkorn slowly stop hating each other and actually start falling in love. Or maybe the writer didn't write those parts. Either way, the crew (director, writer and editor) should take some classes or find other jobs.

Since there have been so many below-average BLs in 2022, I won't call this the worst. But it went out of its way to check every tired, overused and outdated trope that BL fans have seen countless times before and are completely over.
- enemies to lovers
-an extremely rich character whose wealth, sense of victimhood and bratiness are his only character traits
-parents who think arranged marriages are a good idea in the 21st century
-mind numbing background music that is in nearly every second of the series
-useless friends that only exist so the MCs have someone to talk to
-random "BDSM" scenes that show the characters (actually the writers) know nothing about BDSM
-two people who have no reason to even like each other, "fall in love" because ________
-dead fish kisses (Bank looked like he was miserable each time they kissed)
-women who only exist to drive a wedge between the MC
-a man calling another man his wife
-blink and you missed it GL
-people "being in love" after one month of knowing each other
-someone going aboard after I say I'll never leave you

Also, there's a good reason why so many BLs have side couples. It's really hard to keep things interesting for an entire series with only one relationship to focus on. A second couple shakes things up, gives side characters something to do and allows the audience to have a reason to watch even when the relationship or chemistry between the leads stops being interesting. This show REALLY would have benefited from a side couple that got screen time. There were two potential second couples but neither went anywhere which is unfortunate.

Overall, it felt like the earlier episodes and the later episodes were made by different people. Yai's character changed so drastically that I spent most of the series truly confused about what was going on and why. It gave me some really great laugh-out-loud moments though and those usually happened during the NC scenes. But Mos and Bank tried and it's watchable if you skip parts and use 2x speed, so I couldn't hate it.

Lastly, BL sequels are almost always awful. There's no reason to make a sequel to this one, they were barely able to stretch 30 minutes worth of plot into 8 episodes in season 1. But it's StarHunter Entertainment and they've never made a good series, so I expect more of the same in season 2.
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