KaoUp //Lips Garcon&Posh

Love Triangles & Tropes

I have to talk about love triangles for a moment and it is all Light on Me’s fault. 

Most BLs don’t employ true love triangles. Instead they throw in a faen fatal as a plot device who is obviously not a real threat to the main couple for various reasons: 

They’re an underdeveloped character with little back story. 

They’re the wrong gender. 

They enter late in the narrative and/or have very little screen time. 

They engage in no significant romance tropes with the lead. 

With a faen fatal we all know that our two boys will end up together. 

A love triangle is different. 

In a love triangle the audience actually believes the second lead has a good chance of winning over the main character. The second lead is given back story, is the correct gender to be competition, and has significant screen time. And, of course, tropes are used to make the burgeoning romance believable. 

Guess who is great on love triangles and even better at giving audiences bad cases of Second Lead Syndrome?

Why yes, that would be Korea.

When I posted about Korea’s history with BL, I talked about how strategic and clever they are with tropes. I think this is one of the reasons they are so good at believable love triangles. 

But so far they haven’t given us a love triangle in BL… until NOW. 

Light on Me is the Perfect Love Triangle

For the purposes of argument (and because of various elements like the lingering gaze, romance narrative conceits, focus of the camera lens etc) I am going to go with the following:

TaeKyung = our POV or main character (uke*)

ShinWoo = Lead (seme) 

DaOn = Second Lead (seme)

* In addition to specializing in soft low heat BL, Korea likes a slow burn romance and a weak seme/uke dynamic. So we are going back to the original definition of uke: basically the character the others are pursuing and want to take care of. 

Light on Me is using heavy hitting BL tropes to weight TaeKyung’s options fairly. Almost every time the director doles out one significant trope to SinWoo they will then give the same trope to DaOn or vise versa. It’s so smart and fun to watch I started keeping score. 

Crash Into Me AKA Proximity Alert 

(Camera then shows ShinWoo watching this, when it’s a trope he already got to have with TaeKyung.) 

Messy Eater

(Camera then shows DaOn watching this, when it’s a trope he already got to have with TaeKyung.) 

Meet Me In The Library 

Head Touch

(Honestly I am Team ShinWoo solely based on this neck grab.) 

Wound Tending

Light on Me is a master class in how to use tropes to manipulate audience sympathy so they can’t decide which pairing they prefer. Basically, this is how you infect fans with Second Lead Syndrome. It’s SO GOOD. 

Also, did you notice how they spaced this flip-flopping out at first, but then it got closer together? Crash into me with seme 1 then not with seme 2 until a few episodes later. But as the series progresses and the tension increases, the same trope for one seme comes closer in time to the same trope for the other seme, until finally at the end of episode 8, both semes want to wound tend TaeKyung in the same scene! Which mean’s this show is also pacing its tropes to amp up love triangle tension. 

This is clever enough to be mind boggling. I can’t even. 

On the other hand, they will dole out specific tropes to each seme (that the other one doesn’t get to have). So ShinWoo got to tie the shoelaces. But DaOn loaned the umbrella. SinWoo gets to grab and physically demonstrate interest. DaOn gets to flirt and verbally indicate interest. 

Partly this is because TaeKyung is on an enemies-to-lovers arc with SinWoo, but on a friends-to-lovers arc with DaOn (see True Beauty). But also it’s because the two semes are very different personalities. 

Similarly the narrative parcels out TaeKyung’s responses accordingly. 

So TaeKyung collar grab’s SinWoo. This is a trope that is always uke to seme in an agro relationship, because when an uke acts aggressively you know something is going down. It’s commonly used to give uke agency for the first kiss (see We Best Love). TaeKyung also rescues ShinWoo from bullies and gets hurt in the process, another aggressive move with relation to this particular seme and more common in enemies to lovers (see PeteKao in the Kiss series). 

Since DaOn is on a friends to lovers track, TaeKyung is a lot softer with him. 

In fact TaeKyung keeps trying to take care of DaOn, and even performs some seme acts of service (even though he’s the uke character), which is Korea being unbelievably clever with their love triangle. I mean how can we not root for them as a couple? 

Look, I’ve seen the seatbelt trope a million times but only PeteKao have ever flipped it so far as I can recall, and that’s just because Pete keeps getting beaten tf up. This is the kind of proprietary behavior (see also buckling on a safety helmet) only performed by seme on uke. 

Also TaeKyung took care of DaOn when he was sick, remotely, but still he used the umbrella to tell DaOn who was doing it. This is playing with the idea of mutual responsibility and partnership which is very unusual in BL, and makes me like them as a couple all the more because they act on an equal footing. Mutual care is adorable. (See Oxygen for more of this kind of exchange.) 

The interesting thing about DaOn as a second lead is that we know more about his back story than we do our mains. We know he is a neglected child, a people pleaser, and the ultimate caregiver. We watch him fall in love with TaeKyung because TaeKyung is the first person to give DaOn care back. Of course he wants to hold onto that. Also it makes DaOn very very VERY sympathetic to watchers. 

It got bad enough in episode 8 that I begin to wonder, despite all the many narrative clues, if DaOn actually might win TaeKyung in the end. 

See what I mean? 

Second Lead Syndrome! 

I know this has been a praise post, but flipping heck do I hate a love triangle. Because ARGH I want them both! 

Bravo, Korea. 

i can't stop thinking how much of a conscious effort changing pran's look was in ep 5 bc he really does look the Prettiest he has in the series and its all thru pat's eyes. just the thought of p'aof having the makeup team spend a little extra time on him so the audience would be able to fully live thru pat's experience makes me smile like. i really wonder how thoroughly they thought things out and i wouldn't put this beyond them considering how drastically different this ep has made our viewpoints on all the other characters.

Crying today because I learnt that -

if someone lets you go because of lack of courage and not being able to take a stand for themselves, don't worry. Because there'll definitely be someone out there who'll always be there to lend you a shoulder or open their arms to comfort you.

“We’re not like parents in tv dramas”

Right, more like parents in Shakesperian tragedies

as an asexual aromantic person i should be allowed to want to kiss someone. i should be allowed to want to hold hands with someone and sleep in the same bed as them. i should be allowed to do intimate things with someone i love and i should be allowed to have partners that aren't inherently romantic or sexual and have those relationships be respected. i should be allowed to have romantic thoughts and do romantic actions without experiencing romantic attraction. i should be allowed to be asexual and aromantic and live as i want to.

P'aof adding to the collection..

That whole bit, the way the show handled that scene and the way est absolutely nailed it was amazing to me. Like the delivery was so in character, the way Po was just not able to get words out because he was trying so hard to hold it in. And the way he only completely broke down in his room by himself, away from thame cause he knew he didn't have the resolve to walk away if thame continued to console and beg. Oof yep this scene is gonna be talked about in bl history for sure.

Est's delivery on "Thame, aren't you tired?" might just be one of the best bits of acting I've seen in a while

Aren’t you going to ask why I asked you to stay over? Because you’re sad about Joob. Partly, yes. I’m starting to be scared of death. Life is so damn uncertain. I’m afraid that one day I’d wake up and people around me disappear on me. You’re overthinking it. What I fear the most is that it happens to someone I care about. Especially, you. I promise I won’t go anywhere. Nothing will happen to me. Someone like me doesn’t die so easily. Thank you so much. 

VICE VERSA (2022)

All my life, I was always told not to be friends with this one guy- but we all know that forbidden fruit is always sweeter. From two people who can’t be friends, without knowing it, we became two people who couldn’t just be friends. I wrote this song for him.