[1] You may have heard of hallyu, the global export of South Korean popular culture in the 2000s and 2010s. You may also know about the 1990s Japanese wave, as anime and manga began to spread internationally. But do you know about the ongoing Thai wind? Thailand has become a production center for live-action boys' love (BL) dramas. Popular within Thailand and internationally, these dramas and their stars have established the country as a hub for queer media production and kicked off a wave of live-action BL drama production across Asia.
[2] Boys Love Media in Thailand: Celebrity, Fans, and Transnational Asian Queer Popular Culture provides a much-needed introduction to the world of Thai BL media, its idols, and its global influence. The book is 248 pages long, consists of six chapters (plus introduction and conclusion), and contains twenty-four black-and-white illustrations. In it, cultural anthropologist Thomas Baudinette takes a multifaceted and transnational approach to Thai BL dramas. Boys Love Media in Thailand outlines production and marketing contexts and analyzes the dramas' formal and narrative traits. Baudinette also traces the export of Japanese BL into Thailand, the growth of Thai fan networks for queer romance, and the intra-Asia influences of the Japanese and South Korean media industries on Thai media companies. Finally, he dives into the experiences of Thai, Chinese, Filipino, and Japanese fans, exploring Thai BL's significance within a range of personal and national contexts.
[3] Boys Love Media in Thailand shifts the reader's attention to Southeast Asia. Thai BL has been influenced by Japanese BL and K-pop. However, Baudinette believes a larger systemic shift is happening in Asia, with queer Thai media leading the way. Baudinette also problematizes "simplistic accounts of global queering" and decenters "the West as both an inevitable and ideal source of knowledge about queer sexuality" (5). He utilizes an "Asia as Method" approach (Chen 2010) which emphasizes Asia as its own point of reference and problematizes the automatic application of Western theoretical concepts. As a result, Boys Love Media in Thailand is an important model for contemporary fan scholarship, particularly scholars looking at transnational fan networks.
[4] Baudinette is an Australian cultural anthropologist doing traditional and digital ethnographic work in Japan, Thailand, and the Philippines. He is also a fan of Thai BL dramas. This uniquely positions him to map Thai BL's transnational flows and influences. Thai BL dramas meld genre conventions from Japanese BL manga, romantic South Korean television dramas, and traditional Thai serials called lakhorn. The media companies producing these dramas and promoting BL idols are strongly influenced by the idol training, media production, and publicity practices used in Japan and South Korea. However, this is not simply a process where Thai media producers duplicate existing Japanese or South Korean media. Instead, this is a process of adaptation where a Thai-specific approach to BL is developed.
[5] Chapter 1, "A History of BL Media and Fandom in Thailand," covers Japanese BL's arrival in Thailand in the 1990s, BL's growing local popularity, and how the Thai media industry "began producing shows which targeted this market of young women and queer consumers" (28). Referred to as cartoon wai ("wai" representing "y" for yaoi), BL manga gained a following among female high school students and young gay men in Thailand in the 1990s to 2000s (31). Many early Thai sao wai (Y girls) were upper middle class and well educated (32). Over time, these fans became visible to Thai media companies as an untapped consumer audience. This led to experiments like Love Sick (2014–2015), which adapted a popular online novel and featured a BL storyline. When these experiments were successful, BL dramas (or series wai) began to proliferate, making it a mainstream media genre in Thailand.
[6] Chapter 2, "Adapting Japanese BL: Constructing Thai Fans, Mainstreaming Queer Romance," looks closely at several important early Thai BL dramas and their formal qualities. Baudinette traces the stylistic and narrative influence of Japanese BL tropes upon Thai BL dramas. To do this, he first reviews the ōdō (noble formula) shaping Japanese BL. This is a mix "of narrative tropes and stereotypical characterizations that sit at the heart of Japan's BL texts" (57), such as older norms designating clear top and bottom roles for romantic leads; the idea that the leads are only gay for each other, rather than identifying as queer; and dubious/nonconsensual material where sexual aggression is coded as a sign of overwhelming love and desire. As Baudinette explains, these tropes are often criticized for reinforcing heteronormative tropes and problematic LGBTQ+ stereotypes. Instead, many fans "in Japan and overseas…have come to prefer works which push the limits" and norms of the genre (60). Chapter 2 looks closely at four Thai BL series: Love Sick (2014–2015), SOTUS (2016–2018), Love by Chance (2018–2020), and The Effect (2019), comparing ways each series works to uphold or subvert these conventions. Ultimately, Baudinette argues Thai BL uses a mix of old and new traits to produce an alternative to Japanese BL conventions.
[7] Baudinette argues the Thai concept of fin is key to understanding Thai BL's form, aesthetics, and larger BL idol culture. While each term is culturally specific, fin has similar resonances to the Japanese term moe or English-language fans' concept of squee. Originally Thai slang for the satisfaction that comes with finish or climax, fin is now used more broadly by Thai fans "to describe their intense affective responses" to BL media (35). One of the narrative and aesthetic goals of Thai BL producers is to create moments of fin for viewers. However, in the world of Thai BL, fin is produced by actors, in their idol personas, as much as it is created by fictional characters in a drama. While chapters 1 and 2 discuss fin in relation to the fictional content of BL dramas, chapters 2 and 4 shift to focus on idols, the celebrity culture around Thai BL, and these real-life constructions of fin.
[8] Chapter 3, "The Boys Love Machine: Producing Queer Idol Celebrity at GMM," examines the media ecosystem built around Thai BL idols. Baudinette maps out the cyclical process of the BL Machine, where idols are scouted and trained, debut in dramas, and become a recognized celebrity pairing or brand. This is where the concept of khu jin, a Thai-specific framework for shipping, comes into play. K-pop and idol-focused fan fiction is popular in Thailand. Thai media companies "create khu jin to compete with the massive popularity of K-pop idols and shipping among their target market" (89). This chapter focuses on four important khu jin (known to fans as OffGun, TayNew, KristSingto, and BrightWin). All four celebrity pairings are associated with GMM Grammy, Thailand's largest media conglomerate. GMM was one of the first major media companies in Thailand to embrace BL media and is working to train multifaceted celebrity idols and idol pairings that act, sing, dance, and sell products.
[9] After discussing the complicated production context for BL idols in chapter 3, chapter 4, "Social Media, GMM Fan Events, and BL Idol Fandom," explores how "fan practices and idol performances" are used to develop "various forms of shared intimacy," connecting fans to each other and connecting fans to idols (109). Drawing on theories of media tribalism (Ueno 1999), copresence (Jenkins 2003), and digital tribalism (Chang and Park 2019), Baudinette argues companies like GMM work with fans to coproduce tribes "who passionately consume contents starring…popular khu jin idols" (114). This chapter is particularly interested in fans' affective experiences during these events and the ways "intimate connections develop between the khu jin and the fans who observe them" (123). During these events, idols perform songs and skits. They speak to each other and speak to their fans. In this way, "homoerotic intimacy is realized before the fans' collective gaze, transforming it into a consumable commodity" (124). This also allows the companies and the fans to reset, providing closure for a particular BL story while paving the way for the khu jin to release new content in the future.
[10] Each celebrity couple is trained to perform queerness in dramas, at live events, and on social media. The goal is to continually create strong moments of fin, both as a fictional couple in a BL drama and as an idol couple making public appearances. Some readers might label this queerbaiting and dismiss Thai BL as content pairing cute boys together to sell products to a straight female audience. However, Baudinette argues something more complicated is taking place. As of 2020, the audience for Thai BL was 78 percent female and 21 percent male (LINE Insights 2020). Baudinette's research indicates Thai BL has a smaller but dedicated queer audience. The BL Machine may commodify queerness, but it also produces and stabilizes it in the popular imagination. In this way, regardless of what an actor or viewer's sexual preferences might be, the BL Machine produces queer celebrities/idols and represents a queer imaginary (83).
[11] The Thai BL industry grew tremendously during the years in and around the COVID-19 pandemic, as "Thai cultural industries were forced to embrace digitization" (6). Thai BL dramas are subtitled and widely available on many free (e.g., YouTube) and paid (e.g., Viki, iQIYI) streaming platforms. Virtual fan events are often ticketed but frequently come with multilanguage captioning. This is, in part, how the genre rapidly developed its international fan following. While the Asian media ecosystem has traditionally been dominated by East Asian popular culture, chapters 5 and 6 focus on what Thai BL means within Asia and what it offers to Asian audiences. Chapter 5, "Thai BL Goes Global: The Queer Potentials of Chinese and Philippine Fandoms," argues Thai BL fans "are explicitly challenging" this paradigm (142). Baudinette finds Chinese and Filipino fans dissatisfied with Hollywood's LGBTQ+ content and looking for a more Asian-centered take on queer experiences. Chinese fans felt driven to Thai BL by Chinese media censorship. Filipino fans saw their investment in Thai BL as a "strong aspirational mode of consumption" which they were also able to transform into social and political activism (147). The popularity of Thai BL across Asia is "grounded in desires for content that [challenges] heteronormativity" but does it outside of a Western perspective (141). Baudinette argues Chinese and Filipino fans are using Thai BL as "'resources of hope'…through the creation of new knowledge grounded in queer affect" (150).
[12] Chapter 6, "Japan's Thai BL Boom: A New Center for Transnational Asian Queer Popular Culture," follows Thai BL as it is imported back into Japan and grows in popularity there. Many Japanese fans see Thai BL and its fan networks as distinct from traditional Japanese BL media and its fan networks. While crossover exists, many Japanese fans distinguish between Tai-numa (the Thai fandom swamp) and Japan's traditional fujoshi subculture (the rotten women fans of Japanese BL). Many Japanese fans found Thai BL first, often via K-pop, and only discovered Japanese BL afterward. These fans distinguish between the 3D world of live-action BL dramas and the 2D world of BL manga and anime. Each mode is associated with different pleasures and, sometimes, different degrees of realism. Baudinette argues Thai BL operates as an alternative to traditional Japanese BL content and fans are gravitating to it because it offers something fundamentally different. Baudinette believes the growing popularity of Thai BL in Asia and around the world indicates a shift in intra-Asian and global "soft power" (166–67). He closes chapter 6 urging scholars interested in BL media to "decenter Japan…to truly make sense of the powerful and transnational queer affects that Thai BL produces across Asia" (171).
[13] Boys Love Media in Thailand examines early Thai BL shows and idols from 2014 to 2022. This is the period when the genre had just begun to grab international attention. Since 2022, the Thai BL industry has continued to evolve. Its Asian and global influence keeps increasing. Readers familiar with this genre will undoubtably be reading this review and thinking of all the ways Thai BL continues to evolve or of the many live-action BL dramas now produced in Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea. Is this still a specifically Thai wind? Is Thailand still the nexus point Baudinette argues it is? Given the sheer number of new shows and couples, how much of this is commodified queerness versus political/cultural change?
[14] The Boys Love Media in Thailand manuscript was finished in 2022 and published in 2024. This means it was finished before the legalization of gay marriage in Thailand in 2025 and before East Asian media companies began escalating their own BL drama production. However, writing his concluding remarks in 2022, Baudinette hints at what's to come—in particular, the escalating political role of Thai BL dramas/idols in Thailand. As Baudinette observes, the popular BL drama Not Me (2021–2022) brings these different political threads together to tell a BL love story focused on art and political activism. Between 2020 and 2021, Thailand experienced a wave of pro-democracy protests challenging the existing Thai government and Thai monarchy. Many Thai celebrities showed support for these protests, including Thai BL stars like Krist Perawat (half of the KristSingto pairing; Today Writer 2020). These protests were concurrent with a legal and political fight for gay marriage in Thailand, and many BL-associated celebrities spoke up for LGBTQ+ rights in Thailand. In recent years, more Thai BL actors are coming out, and a few celebrity ships have acknowledged they are real couples. Within the current world of Thai BL and its idol culture, it is more difficult than ever for fans to determine what queerness is performed, what is real, or if there can even be a clear distinction between the two.
[15] Boys Love Media in Thailand asks fans and researchers to problematize their assumptions about queer media, embrace ambiguity, and resist older theoretical frameworks. As Baudinette says in his conclusion, we must take an "Asia as method" and Thai-centered approach to understand how Asia is "narrat[ing] its own accounts of queer emancipation" and to "recognize Thai BL media's powerful interventions into global queer culture" (183). Baudinette wants us to pay attention to the blurry ambiguity between queer appropriation and representation or between capitalist consumption and political activism. These gray areas are just as important now as they were when this book was published, and they will continue to be important for many years to come.