Love By Chance's second season is emblematic of everything wrong with Thai BL.

At this stage, Thailand produces BL just to produce BL. It's cheap, it's easy, it makes quick cash. And this environment of cash over content was inevitably going to produce a show like Love By Chance 2.

The fact is, everyone involved with this lucrative and popular franchise simply does not care about their story or their characters. And it shows.

We're all aware - generally if not specifically - about the behind-the-scenes issues that meant Saint would not be returning for this sequel. And since Love By Chance as a vehicle was underpinned by Pete and Ae's relationship, the writers had to decide what to do with Pete's character without the actor. They had two choices: recast or find a reason for Pete to not be around. But whatever you do with a sequel based on a romance you don't kill that character off screen and you definitely don't have them break up off screen. Otherwise - why did people sit through the first season if it had no point?

It's not just that the writers took the cheap route of breaking Pete and Ae up - off screen. They then took the rather bizarre route of not progressing Tin and Can's relationship but instead circling it back to the beginning and simply repeating the plot points from season 1. This not only removes those relationship beats from all their context rendering them mostly meaningless. It creates a confusing situation whereby Pete, Ae, Techno and the other characters are living in a universe where Season 1 happened but TinCan isn't. I'm all for particle physics but I don't need some kind of Schrodinger's season where I'm never sure at any point if it did or did not exist.

If we made a list of everything that you can do wrong with a sequel, then Love By Chance has blithely decided to do all of them. Not because of necessity but because of laziness: because nobody involved actually cares about this story or its characters. And as a consequence I don't care either.

Love By Chance is an utterly pointless addition to the universe, one that exists merely to milk an audience that is genuinely invested in this series of shows and deserves better. It's about time Thailand stop pumping out third-rate BL for the sake of it and began to invest time and energy in development.

PS Perth is a genuinely fine actor who should be doing much much better projects than this. He steals every scene he's in just by walking into it and while Ae's plotline is pretty pointless and used only to help TinCan learn a Very Important Lesson About Love, Perth brings to it genuine gravitas. I really want to see him do something better but for that Thailand is going to have to get out of this current rut.