Beautiful production, passable acting, and lots of steamy scenes...but romanticized abuse and a weak plot.

(Tw: child grooming/pedophilia discussed in next paragraph)

Let's hope the people who had the idea to combine child betrothal with an age gap just didn't think it through, because if not we've got people totally fine with child grooming and pedophilia on our hands. And even though this issue is STARING us in the face (the leads are literally shown meeting when one is an infant and the other is like...seven), it's just absolutely never addressed. Instead, we have the older ML saying things like "I've never not loved you" and "I've been waiting [to have sex with you]" to a brand-new adult to whom he has been a family friend since the guy was born. (Yes, this show made me google the age of adulthood in Thailand. Yes, I know that the age of consent is younger. That doesn't matter to me.) So these statements imply that this man who has been an adult for about seven years longer than his partner has been sexualizing him for...how long? This isn't 1815, when Jane Austen's Mr. Knightley could get away with telling Emma he fell in love with her when she was fourteen and he was twenty-something. This is 2022, when we know that sexualizing minors when you're an adult is wrong. This could have been easily avoided if the creators had just made the leads closer in age or clarified that the older ML only started to see the younger in a romantic light once he became an adult, but for some reason they just... didn't do that.

And that's not even touching on how controlling and stalker-y the older ML is, which plenty of other reviews go into detail about. The writers took the most regressive parts of heteronormativity and pasted them onto this gay relationship, with the younger ML playing the part of the naive, submissive woman who needs a man to make all her decisions for her because she can't think for herself. Then the writers tried to combine that with pro-LGBTQ advocacy messages here and there, and the result was jarring. It's nice that they care about rights for LGBTQ people, but it would have been nicer if they had actually cared to like...meet actual gay people and find out what their relationships are like before writing gay people as committed to replicating unhealthy heteronormative standards.
 
The writers liked the abusive dynamics in the first couple so much that they just recreated them for the second couple, with even less explanation as to why that couple has that power imbalance. And in both relationships, it's all romanticized and not challenged at all. (Commenters need to understand that Dom/sub relationships require CONSENT. Someone who's trying to control their partner and his life without his consent isn't a Dom; they're an abuser.)

Outside of the ethical issues, the plot of the show was pretty weak. It hinges entirely on the leads' lack of communication - only the younger ML discovers pretty early on that the older ML actually knows everything he's been trying to hide, but he just... decides to forget it? Like truly, if that revelation had followed out to its logical conclusion, the lack of communication could have been solved fairly quickly. Then the leads could have worked on being better, more honest partners to each other. But nonsensically, we didn't get that.

The two younger best friends had more rapport, real affection, honest communication, and (dare I say) chemistry with each other than with their older partners. Their friendship was a bright spot in this drama.

I only finished for the third couple. I was really interested in the idea of a super religious guy who sees no conflict between his religion and his sexuality, but sadly, they got little screen time.