Wow, this was sort of, kinda, lowkey really good.

As someone, who has their qualms with the BL fandom, I am always a bit wary when it comes to BxB content, often I am left with a weird, fetishistic mess, but people insisted Gaya Sa Pelikula is one of the good ones
And you know what?
They're right.

This was the first Filipino show I have ever watched and I found it incredibly charming. I think the reason why this struck a chord with me is that, while this drama has its flaws, I could tell that it comes from a place of sincerity.
My beef with most BL content is, while it capitalizes off gay relationships, it is so often very far removed from anything LGBT+. The writers/directors are often straight. The actors usually are. The plot is often centered around some weird harem full of handsome, vaguely similar-looking young men, so far removed from anything resembling "the gay experience tm”. Often times they treat the more flamboyant, feminine gay characters as a punchline, oftentimes they refuse to even use the word gay. BLs are so obviously produced for a straight audience. And that is okay, I guess.
But it's nothing I am particularly interested in.

Gaya Sa Pelikula is very much not that. I could tell that the plot, the characters everything about it, came from the corner of someone's heart. Because it touches on something real. It isn't afraid of tackling subjects such as unsupportive parents, internalized homophobia, heck even micro-aggressions within the LGBT+ community get mentioned here. It just felt... I don't know, real? Like the author obviously was drawing from his own experiences. And this is what made this show stand out to me. But okay let me structure this properly.

Let’s start off with everything I love about this drama:
I love all the characters in this, even the minor ones, but I especially love Karl. Many viewers were probably charmed by smart, outgoing, sassy emotionally intelligent Vlad, and I can’t blame them, but the character I found myself most in is Karl. I feel like he is, not only a relatable character for many LGBT+ teens, as he tries to figure out his sexuality, but relatable for a lot of young people in general. We all know the feeling of being a side character in our own story. And this feeling of having no agency in life, was beautifully conveyed in the show’s poignant dialogue. While I found the premise of the show cheesy and sort of immature, the dialogue very much was not. Not only was the banter between the two leads funny, cute and natural, but the dialogue in the more serious scenes was remarkably intelligent. Gaya Sa Pelikula, as mentioned, managed to touch on a lot of social topics, without it feeling like strict PSAs or the writer’s way of speaking directly to the audience. Every character had a distinctive way of speaking and everyone had a unique perspective and something important to say.
I also have to give a shoutout to the show’s female characters, as BLs very rarely take the time to write three-dimensional women. A lot of people loved Anna, and I get why, but I found Judit, Vlad’s sister much more intriguing. Yes, she was deeply flawed and oftentimes annoying but that was her point and what I liked so much about her. I found her journey as an ally very believable and important and especially the scene where Vlad calls her out for her performative activism left a huge impression on me. It showed that sometimes meaning well, simply isn’t enough, while also demonstrating how much she truly cares for her brother and wants the best for him.
This is also one of the rare occasions where I actually have something to say about the show’s OST: It’s great! Every song is an “absolute banger” as the teens say, especially “True Young Lovers” which I still haven’t stopped listening to. Everything in the soundtrack felt like it served a purpose and nicely accentuated the scene it was in.

On to the things I did not love about Gaya Sa Pelikula.
This show did not have a big budget and sadly you can just tell. I realize that this is something the production team, in the end, has very little control over, sometimes you have to work with what you have, so this is definitely one of the drama's minor offenses, but as a result, the cinematography doesn’t stand out. There were a few scenes where they were more creative with it, but mostly it fell rather flat. I also feel like this either wasn’t really color-corrected or like the color correction was just sort of… bad? The colors were extremely pale and it did throw me off sometimes.
This story also definitely just needed more time. I have commended this show in the paragraph above for how many issues it tackled and its characters but sometimes it did feel like it bit off more than it could chew. Anna’s side story of her temporarily leaving her daughter was fairly heavy and felt like something that could have been explored more, but since this is a mini-web-series, the whole thing gets resolved rather quickly and off-screen as well. In the end, I was left wondering if it hadn’t been better if they had left out that plot point entirely.
While I think that Vlad and Karl’s actors had good chemistry and while I definitely loved their banter, they needed more time together as well. The whole progression of them falling in love with each other was a bit unclear to me and did feel a bit rushed, unfortunately.
At times this drama also felt a bit overwritten. Like I don’t think we needed tragic lore on why exactly Vlad doesn’t like it when people touch his hair, I get what the writer was trying to do, but it gave me a bit of a “Joker-origin story”-feel if that makes any sense at all.
Also, and this is just personal preference, I just couldn’t get over the premise. The whole “fake dating”-thing made me cringe through the entirety of the show. I could have gotten past it if the rest of the show had been more on the silly side but it was just a bit too fanfiction-y to me, in a story that otherwise was very mature. I fully get that a lot of other people love this stuff, but I just don’t. I usually prefer for my romances to feel more grounded in reality, especially if the tone of the rest show is more serious. But again, this is something that comes down to personal preference.

The way this show tackled LGBT+ topics was honestly something I have never seen before. It wasn’t “great for an Asian drama”. It was just great. Period. Many scenes here will tuck on your heartstrings. Obviously, Karls and Vlad's breakup made me sad, but the first scene that brought tears to my eyes was between Karl and his gay uncle (a flamboyant, overweight man that is more than just a punchline, I can’t believe it). “I’m not always suffering because I am gay but because I always choose to love. So don’t turn me into a cautionary tale, I’m too fabulous to be one.”- How beautifully put in a show that is essentially about queer suffering. Many stories centered around the gay experience are so caught up with dealing with trauma, that they completely forget to remind us that grief is the price we pay for love. And that it is worth paying.
This show successfully captured the beauty of your first love and heartache as you figure out who you are. Never has "right person-wrong time" been so accurate. It doesn't demonize Karl for needing his time before he is ready to come out. It doesn’t demonize Vlad for not being able to go back into the closet. Neither of them has done anything wrong, it is society that has wronged them.

As I researched the writer of Gaya Sa Pelikula, I came across an interview where he stated, that the drama was indeed based on personal experience. That he once was like Karl and many years ago met his Vlad, an out and proud gay man who he fell in love with and who also loved him. But like Karl, the writer was not ready to come out, so when the other man asked him to be in a public relationship, he turned him down. When he eventually was comfortable enough to come out, the man he had rejected, had moved on and they could only be friends. Shortly after this, his first love died tragically at a young age.
This is the real heartache of this show. That the author’s first love will never be able to see this tribute to him. That it is a story of “could-have-been”s. “What would happen if we didn’t have to be afraid?”, is a question that Vlad asks in the very last episode and it is the one I have been asking myself ever since I watched this show.
Gaya Sa Pelikula, while being flawed, beautifully illustrated the importance of queer voices. Because this a story only a gay person could tell. And the more often we hear stories like these, the less often they will have to occur. In that sense, kudos to this show, for being so real, for being so poignant, for being so open, so vulnerable, so very very relevant.

I want to take this last paragraph to tell my fellow LGBT+ folks: Get your story out there. Whether it be in the form of an actual book or movie or if that just means existing and being an active part of the community, our experiences matter. No matter where you are in life, whether you can live your truth or are still in the closet, you’re so valid and important. What you have to say makes a difference and helps make this world a better place. You are the main character of your life. You have a story that no one else can tell, so make sure you tell it.