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Gameboys philippines drama review
Dropped 10/13
Gameboys
11 people found this review helpful
by jpny01
Jun 4, 2020
10 of 13 episodes seen
Dropped 21
Overall 7.0
Story 5.0
Acting/Cast 8.0
Music 7.0
Rewatch Value 5.0

It's good, but...

This was something special at first - Gavreel actually acted like a hot young gay man, instead of a like a 12-year old virgin like all the characters in Thai BL dramas (not complaining, I love Thai BLs). I was really excited after the first episode. Unfortuantely, it didn't live up to that promise.

On the one hand, it's interesting to see COVID brought into the drama, but I didn't care for the manipulative way it was used - it's a bit distasteful. COVID is overwhelmingly caused by lots of people being in a closed space with poor air circulation, and then bringning it home to your household, not going outside to look for someone.

The issue for me with this show is that it's all fluff and fanservice, or as much as it can be when the two leads have no physical interaction - although they finally meet almost at the end of the series, but I couldn't get past wondering why the authorities let Gav put that [you know what I'm talking about] there or how the wind didn't blow it to China.

None of the drama is organic to the two main characters - it's all manufactured external factors - ex-girlfriend, ex-boyfriend, COVID, car breaking down, fujoshi inexplicably not pointing out communication failures to her friends, fujoshi deliberately causing communication failures between her friends (more than once), and failures of communication that are so contrived and unbelievable that I lose sympathy for the characters. There is no organic progress in the relationship - Gavreel acts cute and pouty, which loses its appeal eventually and Cairo acts irritated and disgusted with it. Suddenly out of nowhere he says he's Gavreel's "baby", which is so out of character and unmotivated that it feels like the producers realized they were running out of time and had to "level up". I think it was perhaps a mistake was to extend the series too much past the planned run, because it made the show repetitive and character development oddly halting and slow. If it had been 8 episodes, I suspect it would have been much stronger and a lot of the repetitiveness avoided.

The show isn't bad, but I honestly don't see why everyone loves it so much - I guess if you need a happy diversion and want tons of cuteness, this will be for you - but to me something isn't cute when it's too self-consciously cute like Gav's pouty mugging and calling Cairo bayBEEE every 10 seconds. When I compare it to the far-more complex and multi-layered Hello Stranger, I can't believe almost everyone prefers this series - but then HS is a bit heavy and I'm not sure it's really a BL. The COVID-mandated social media structure of Gameboys is interesting, timely, and well-executed, but there are lots of series doing this, albeit not quite as well.

The acting is fine. I thought Cairo was awful at first, but when called upon to act, he can seriously act, so I guess the problem is the writing. Gav is sexy, but not entirely convincing. The fujoshi is irrelevant to the plot and just takes up time.

I did appreciate the social consciousness of the show - and I suspect this is an important element in the high ratings this series is getting. I also appreciated avoidance of the disturbing obsession in most of BL with Top and Bottom and forcing them into heteronormative gender roles.

I Initially gave up on this, but everyone pressured me into continuing - and if anything I like it less than before, although I upped a couple of the scores I gave, like for the acting. Ep 10 felt like a conclusion, so that's where I'm stopping. Eventually I will come back to this show and watch it all the way through - maybe my reaction to it will be different.
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