Bloodhounds Season 2 | Yaoi  for People Who Love Suffering

Similarly to when season 1 came out a million years ago, it took me a bit of time to get around to watching Bloodhounds Season 2. I can’t say whether that was a good or bad decision. What I will stand by is that in order to understand it, you really need to watch Season 1 immediately before watching Season 2.

Firstly, Bloodhounds is best described as torture porn. It is such a difficult watch. I’m not sure what sort of audience likes thus atmosphere, but it is so draining to see the good guys insisting on fighting fairly with morals only to get destroyed ten times an episode by their opponents who love killing as many people as possible.

I don’t know, I just feel that if I was in some nightmare situation like that it would be fine to use a gun or a knife or a bunch of thugs to level the playing field.

The worst part of  Bloodhounds is the size of the cast we are expected to remember 4 years after the first season. On average, the human mind has the capacity to recognise and remember 150 other people in order to maintain social relationships with them. The creators of Bloodhounds appear to have forgotten that most people fill up their mental capacity with people they know in real life. Every scene introduces yet another middle-aged man with an extensive backstory we are supposed to recall.

Sorry, I was not biting. I refused to out myself watching the main characters getting beaten up for season 1 before returning to see it all again in season 2. I simply accepted the fact that I would never know who any of these men were. I waited and waited for Damin to appear because I remembered her despite only appearing for 2 episodes but there was no such luck.

Regardless of who these men were, they all invariably had the same reaction to Gunwoo. The most interesting thing about Bloodhounds is that the world has the same composition as m/m fan fiction. There are around 5 women who exist due to unavoidable circumstances, and everyone has a soft spot for the most specialest and amazingest boy in the whole world.

Now, the drama pretends it isn’t yaoi by having Gunwoo wonder aloud if Woojin and tech whiz Taeyeong are romantically involved. Nobody should fall for that. Heterosexual relationships don’t exist on screen in Bloodhounds. There are a suspicious number of single parent families and anybody with a wife only has a daughter. I’ve never seen anybody on this show have a son. Interesting, no?

And can you guess why there are no heterosexual romantic relationships shown on screen? No, it is not because the genre is action/noir/thriller or whatever. It is because nothing the writers, editors, or actors could do would convey anything even half as romantic as whatever Gunwoojin have going on.

Sure, Kim Gunwoo is the most perfectest and importantest boy in the whole entire world. Every man who meets Gunwoo wants to protect him and do everything beyond their power to make him happy. Everybody loves him for the obvious reasons that he is cute and hardworking. Who wouldn’t love him? The good guys adore him and the bad guys are obsessed with him.

But the writers are loyal. Nobody is going to love Gunwoo more than Woojin does.

Gunwoo and Woojin are sickening on screen. There’s that famous quote about how men only know how to love each other and it definitely applies to Gunwoojin. Not only are they way too much about each other, it is crazy how you can watch the drama and then see scenes unfold, only to realise that they’re about to eff nasty style right afterwards.

On screen, the two characters sleep in bunk beds but metatextually, that is not what is going on at all. It was already lampshaded by Damin in season 1, but in season 2 it feels like the alleged sleeping arrangements are shown just to make sure certain kinds of viewers who enjoy the homoeroticism and gratuitous male body worship of something like Bloodhounds (straight men, probably) don’t feel uncomfortable.

The fact is, the composition of a world that revolves around men in this way is more similar to a yaoi world than someone who doesn’t engage in that sort of story would realise. Bloodhounds is created exactly like yaoi city and it makes me wonder if the source material could possibly have created a backdrop like this.

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