Great Men Academy
Get ready to take a step back into the fluffiest and sweetest of BL fantasy worlds, with 2019 Thai series Great Men Academy - where school lessons are a series of gaming adventures, wish-granting unicorns roam the forests, and manipulating your friends is never the best way to achieve success.
Summary: High school girl Love is obsessed with dreamboat Vier from the local private boys school, Great Men Academy (GMA). Vier has won his school competition "The Greatest" two years in a row, and he's now aiming for his third and final win as a senior. Love stalks him online and has decorated her room wall to wall with images of handsome Vier. When Love is suspended from her own school for three months for fighting with a student about Vier, she tries to come up with a solution to meet him. Her strait-laced older brother Good, who attends GMA and is a dorm monitor, refuses to help her. One day, while hiking through the local forest between her house and the school, Love comes across a unicorn, injured with a thorn in its side. When Love removes the thorn, the grateful unicorn grants her a wish. Thinking of Vier, Love wishes for her great love to come true. Of course, the unicorn leaves the wish open to interpretation! It tells Love she must take a swim in the forest lake, but as soon as she does, she turns into a boy. The unicorn tells her she must come back to the lake every night before midnight and change back to Love the Girl, or she will remain as Love the Boy forever. Love is horrified but soon realises that she can take advantage of her gender switch by attending GMA for three months, getting closer to Vier in the process, and testing to see if he's gay. Love the Boy succeeds in getting into the school, and makes some good friends on the way, but her obsession with Vier and finding true love goes completely off the rails. Will she find love with Vier, but as a boy? Will the unicorn's wish prove to be a curse? Or does true love find its way to Love in a totally unexpected way?
With its gender swap storyline mixed in with schoolgirl crush fantasies, low-key Takumi-kun-style private school BL and a non-violent Hunger Games-style mob entertainment tournament, Great Men Academy is something of a mixed bag that doesn't know exactly what sort of a program it wants to be. But while the series isn't cohesive as a whole, its individual elements can be really interesting and - best of all - entertaining. As with most of its other subplots and fantasies, GMA's individual BL elements actually stand up well on their own. There are plenty of other series that can take their inspiration from GMA about how to create the basics of an interesting BL narrative. One of the greatest scenes in the series shows the exact moment when one of the central characters gets the thunderbolt shock of realising they're attracted to someone of the same sex. I've never seen it done quite like this before, and it's funny, touching and pure BL fantasy of the best kind.
Love's main purpose of getting closer to Vier - getting to know him in order to deceive him romantically into revealing he's either gay or straight - takes on a life of its own and, to its credit, the story is both unpredictable and original. Once you get over the stupidity of the initial conceit involving the unicorn, you're completely invested in Love winning over her man and fulfilling her destiny. (How Love the Boy manages to get into GMA as a student and get a dorm room is never explained. Talk about a plot hole.) Her adventure takes her through a number of different episodic plot points - some are comic, some deadly serious, some romantic, and some are outright bizarre. She gets through them with varying degrees of success, and it's hard not to end up admiring her courage, kindness and perseverance under pressure.
GMA's more serious moments start to flow when Love realises that her journey at GMA isn't going to be all puppy love, unicorns and strategising how to win over Vier. As much as she might have wanted at first to manipulate Vier and her new friends to get to her goal, the reality of what it means to want control over others' desires and feelings strikes her with the force of a stern moral lesson. Some of the lessons are so severe, she ends up in tears. Ultimately, GMA wants to teach its students how to be Great Men, but to achieve this aim, its classes strangely have nothing to do with arithmetic or studies; they are much more like video-game-play challenges where you learn valuable life lessons. One teacher sets up the first year students with senior mentors - which might have ended up being tedious to watch, but the story takes a deliberately unexpected tack that makes its lessons about shared responsibilities more appealing to everyone involved, including the audience. Another teacher has invented a strange type of projector which creates a digital ghost that roams the school grounds unless the students can catch it and convince it to cross over. The ghost is scary enough to make the boys hesitate and think carefully before speaking to it, but its ultimate lesson is an important one on the value of empathy and men expressing emotion. The series' key showstopper, "The Greatest" tournament that's broadcast as a Reality TV program, isn't as successful as it should be - it's too poorly directed and lacks pacing and tension - but it still gives the main characters a chance to shine and show their strengths and abilities. Vier's natural leadership skills see him take control of the first part of the competition, but "The Greatest" is not solely about strength of character, it's a test of moral fibre too. The second part of the competition throws out all the stops, with the revelations and tough decisions coming thick and fast. Through each of these challenges, the students learn more about themselves and what it means to be a genuinely decent person. Placing Love into this context works, as she not only learns the same important lessons about morality and decency that help her to mature, but she also provides the group with a woman's valuable perspective that they wouldn't have considered otherwise. (Setting aside the series' broad comedy about Love the Boy's femininity, it's disappointing to note that this is about the only thing of value that GMA does with its gender swap plot, which is otherwise used solely as a device to place Love in an all-boys school. At times, it almost feels like the narrative writes around Love being a girl as if she is an inconvenient obstacle standing in the way of Love the Boy.)
The best drama of GMA is all centred around Love. From the moment she arrives at the school as a boy, she has a bigger impact on all the students than she could ever have anticipated. Her focus on Vier soon loses priority, as the stresses of school life and socialising with her new friends take a front seat. The story ensures that we easily accept that Love, as a boy, is so charming and mystifying to everyone at GMA that he naturally becomes the centre of everyone's attention. He might look girlish and act effeminately, but his feminine instincts and generous spirit win over everyone. This is the heart of GMA, from where it gives us its best storylines. Love's dormmate, naive boyish Meann, wants his help with meeting a girl he inconveniently has a crush on. Outgoing playboy Nuclear tries to balance dating two different girls as if the only problem he has with it is whether the newer girl will be deceived into liking him or not. When both Love and the new girl pull him up on his false manner and sketchy motives, it forces ashamed Nuclear to reassess his behaviour. Vier's suspicions lead him to treat a mortified Love with cold disdain, but events soon show him that the truth is never that simple, and that his own insecurities and competitive nature bring out the worst aspects of his own character. Vier is by far the most interesting character in the series as a result. He has more depth to him than any of the other students, and his difficult relationship with his father adds another deeply-felt dramatic element to his personality and story. Vier's clownish prankster best friend Taengmo plays tricks on Love repeatedly at first, but with Love's influence, he becomes a more focused, serious young man, with the potential to beat Vier and become the school's best student. Love's brother Good shatters his loser nerd image in Love's eyes, and she learns to perceive him as a human with real feelings, affections and fears, which she, as his sister, can naturally support him with. Played by Love Sick's wonderful star Captain with an impressive mix of menace and vulnerability, secretive second-year student Sean looks like he's going to be the villain of the piece, as he torments Love with his suspicions and calculated cruelty. But even his story takes a turn, thanks to Love. It's a tiny role with very little to do, but Captain is just as eye-catching as ever, and he takes to the role with relish.
Once Love the Boy is settled at GMA, and his new friends get to know him better, there are lots of dramatic scenes with him that work really well, and not just those that threaten to expose her identity or push her obsession with Vier forward. There's a judo competition scene - and the gut-wrenching locker room scene that precedes it - that are so overwhelmingly good, they're up there for me with certain scenes in 'Cause You're My Boy as some of the best drama in BL of the past year. It's really well-conceived and a great example of how (surprisingly?) successful GMA can be in its drama. This scene will take your breath away, mainly because of its moral implications for at least one of the characters. Throughout the series, GMA generally doesn't like to delve too deeply into murky moral ambiguities, which is a lost opportunity with ripe plot points like the judo scene, but it amply demonstrates what can happen to weaker personalities when they are subjected to clear-cut Good vs Bad dilemmas and yet they still pick Bad. Again and again, GMA puts its characters into morally compromising, dramatically awkward positions and forces them to decide how to deal with them. Some of them fail and disappoint us, some succeed and we cheer for them. But all of them act with a completely credible humanity, and they all earn our sympathy and love. We're fully invested in all the central characters making the right decisions and, most importantly, being their best selves. Being great men, in fact.
GMA is breezy, fun entertainment. It has a very likeable, energetic, positive vibe that bounces from one fantasy storyline to the next without getting too badly weighed down by any of the difficult obstacles it throws in front of its engaging characters. Bring on Season Two!
Rating: 13/20
Ending: Perfectly happy with lots of pretty rainbows.
Wow, that ending! Let's just say that the unicorn knew exactly what it was doing when it granted Love her wish of finding her true love. It's got to be one of the sweetest in BL.
Best scene: the excellent locker-room scene / judo scene combination will blow you away.
But for comedy, it's hard to go past the stupefying 'dance performance' scene in Vier and Taengmo's dorm room. I haven't laughed so much at a BL comedy scene since The Nickname Scene in Love by Chance.
Note that English subtitled copies of this series are currently very hard to come by. It appears Line TV is hunting down all online copies with a vengeance and getting them taken down immediately. If you're having problems, especially with the final episodes, try this site. It's riddled with ad pop-ups and its format is practically unuseable, but GMA is hidden in there somewhere, so keep looking. Hopefully they are still up by the time you read this review.
**EDIT: a big BL-loving thank-you to keen-eyed blog reader Shirasade, who has very helpfully pointed out that website Kissasian still has all subbed episodes of GMA available. Definitely check them out there first.
Summary: High school girl Love is obsessed with dreamboat Vier from the local private boys school, Great Men Academy (GMA). Vier has won his school competition "The Greatest" two years in a row, and he's now aiming for his third and final win as a senior. Love stalks him online and has decorated her room wall to wall with images of handsome Vier. When Love is suspended from her own school for three months for fighting with a student about Vier, she tries to come up with a solution to meet him. Her strait-laced older brother Good, who attends GMA and is a dorm monitor, refuses to help her. One day, while hiking through the local forest between her house and the school, Love comes across a unicorn, injured with a thorn in its side. When Love removes the thorn, the grateful unicorn grants her a wish. Thinking of Vier, Love wishes for her great love to come true. Of course, the unicorn leaves the wish open to interpretation! It tells Love she must take a swim in the forest lake, but as soon as she does, she turns into a boy. The unicorn tells her she must come back to the lake every night before midnight and change back to Love the Girl, or she will remain as Love the Boy forever. Love is horrified but soon realises that she can take advantage of her gender switch by attending GMA for three months, getting closer to Vier in the process, and testing to see if he's gay. Love the Boy succeeds in getting into the school, and makes some good friends on the way, but her obsession with Vier and finding true love goes completely off the rails. Will she find love with Vier, but as a boy? Will the unicorn's wish prove to be a curse? Or does true love find its way to Love in a totally unexpected way?
With its gender swap storyline mixed in with schoolgirl crush fantasies, low-key Takumi-kun-style private school BL and a non-violent Hunger Games-style mob entertainment tournament, Great Men Academy is something of a mixed bag that doesn't know exactly what sort of a program it wants to be. But while the series isn't cohesive as a whole, its individual elements can be really interesting and - best of all - entertaining. As with most of its other subplots and fantasies, GMA's individual BL elements actually stand up well on their own. There are plenty of other series that can take their inspiration from GMA about how to create the basics of an interesting BL narrative. One of the greatest scenes in the series shows the exact moment when one of the central characters gets the thunderbolt shock of realising they're attracted to someone of the same sex. I've never seen it done quite like this before, and it's funny, touching and pure BL fantasy of the best kind.
Love's main purpose of getting closer to Vier - getting to know him in order to deceive him romantically into revealing he's either gay or straight - takes on a life of its own and, to its credit, the story is both unpredictable and original. Once you get over the stupidity of the initial conceit involving the unicorn, you're completely invested in Love winning over her man and fulfilling her destiny. (How Love the Boy manages to get into GMA as a student and get a dorm room is never explained. Talk about a plot hole.) Her adventure takes her through a number of different episodic plot points - some are comic, some deadly serious, some romantic, and some are outright bizarre. She gets through them with varying degrees of success, and it's hard not to end up admiring her courage, kindness and perseverance under pressure.
GMA's more serious moments start to flow when Love realises that her journey at GMA isn't going to be all puppy love, unicorns and strategising how to win over Vier. As much as she might have wanted at first to manipulate Vier and her new friends to get to her goal, the reality of what it means to want control over others' desires and feelings strikes her with the force of a stern moral lesson. Some of the lessons are so severe, she ends up in tears. Ultimately, GMA wants to teach its students how to be Great Men, but to achieve this aim, its classes strangely have nothing to do with arithmetic or studies; they are much more like video-game-play challenges where you learn valuable life lessons. One teacher sets up the first year students with senior mentors - which might have ended up being tedious to watch, but the story takes a deliberately unexpected tack that makes its lessons about shared responsibilities more appealing to everyone involved, including the audience. Another teacher has invented a strange type of projector which creates a digital ghost that roams the school grounds unless the students can catch it and convince it to cross over. The ghost is scary enough to make the boys hesitate and think carefully before speaking to it, but its ultimate lesson is an important one on the value of empathy and men expressing emotion. The series' key showstopper, "The Greatest" tournament that's broadcast as a Reality TV program, isn't as successful as it should be - it's too poorly directed and lacks pacing and tension - but it still gives the main characters a chance to shine and show their strengths and abilities. Vier's natural leadership skills see him take control of the first part of the competition, but "The Greatest" is not solely about strength of character, it's a test of moral fibre too. The second part of the competition throws out all the stops, with the revelations and tough decisions coming thick and fast. Through each of these challenges, the students learn more about themselves and what it means to be a genuinely decent person. Placing Love into this context works, as she not only learns the same important lessons about morality and decency that help her to mature, but she also provides the group with a woman's valuable perspective that they wouldn't have considered otherwise. (Setting aside the series' broad comedy about Love the Boy's femininity, it's disappointing to note that this is about the only thing of value that GMA does with its gender swap plot, which is otherwise used solely as a device to place Love in an all-boys school. At times, it almost feels like the narrative writes around Love being a girl as if she is an inconvenient obstacle standing in the way of Love the Boy.)
The best drama of GMA is all centred around Love. From the moment she arrives at the school as a boy, she has a bigger impact on all the students than she could ever have anticipated. Her focus on Vier soon loses priority, as the stresses of school life and socialising with her new friends take a front seat. The story ensures that we easily accept that Love, as a boy, is so charming and mystifying to everyone at GMA that he naturally becomes the centre of everyone's attention. He might look girlish and act effeminately, but his feminine instincts and generous spirit win over everyone. This is the heart of GMA, from where it gives us its best storylines. Love's dormmate, naive boyish Meann, wants his help with meeting a girl he inconveniently has a crush on. Outgoing playboy Nuclear tries to balance dating two different girls as if the only problem he has with it is whether the newer girl will be deceived into liking him or not. When both Love and the new girl pull him up on his false manner and sketchy motives, it forces ashamed Nuclear to reassess his behaviour. Vier's suspicions lead him to treat a mortified Love with cold disdain, but events soon show him that the truth is never that simple, and that his own insecurities and competitive nature bring out the worst aspects of his own character. Vier is by far the most interesting character in the series as a result. He has more depth to him than any of the other students, and his difficult relationship with his father adds another deeply-felt dramatic element to his personality and story. Vier's clownish prankster best friend Taengmo plays tricks on Love repeatedly at first, but with Love's influence, he becomes a more focused, serious young man, with the potential to beat Vier and become the school's best student. Love's brother Good shatters his loser nerd image in Love's eyes, and she learns to perceive him as a human with real feelings, affections and fears, which she, as his sister, can naturally support him with. Played by Love Sick's wonderful star Captain with an impressive mix of menace and vulnerability, secretive second-year student Sean looks like he's going to be the villain of the piece, as he torments Love with his suspicions and calculated cruelty. But even his story takes a turn, thanks to Love. It's a tiny role with very little to do, but Captain is just as eye-catching as ever, and he takes to the role with relish.
Once Love the Boy is settled at GMA, and his new friends get to know him better, there are lots of dramatic scenes with him that work really well, and not just those that threaten to expose her identity or push her obsession with Vier forward. There's a judo competition scene - and the gut-wrenching locker room scene that precedes it - that are so overwhelmingly good, they're up there for me with certain scenes in 'Cause You're My Boy as some of the best drama in BL of the past year. It's really well-conceived and a great example of how (surprisingly?) successful GMA can be in its drama. This scene will take your breath away, mainly because of its moral implications for at least one of the characters. Throughout the series, GMA generally doesn't like to delve too deeply into murky moral ambiguities, which is a lost opportunity with ripe plot points like the judo scene, but it amply demonstrates what can happen to weaker personalities when they are subjected to clear-cut Good vs Bad dilemmas and yet they still pick Bad. Again and again, GMA puts its characters into morally compromising, dramatically awkward positions and forces them to decide how to deal with them. Some of them fail and disappoint us, some succeed and we cheer for them. But all of them act with a completely credible humanity, and they all earn our sympathy and love. We're fully invested in all the central characters making the right decisions and, most importantly, being their best selves. Being great men, in fact.
GMA is breezy, fun entertainment. It has a very likeable, energetic, positive vibe that bounces from one fantasy storyline to the next without getting too badly weighed down by any of the difficult obstacles it throws in front of its engaging characters. Bring on Season Two!
Rating: 13/20
Ending: Perfectly happy with lots of pretty rainbows.
Wow, that ending! Let's just say that the unicorn knew exactly what it was doing when it granted Love her wish of finding her true love. It's got to be one of the sweetest in BL.
Best scene: the excellent locker-room scene / judo scene combination will blow you away.
But for comedy, it's hard to go past the stupefying 'dance performance' scene in Vier and Taengmo's dorm room. I haven't laughed so much at a BL comedy scene since The Nickname Scene in Love by Chance.
Note that English subtitled copies of this series are currently very hard to come by. It appears Line TV is hunting down all online copies with a vengeance and getting them taken down immediately. If you're having problems, especially with the final episodes, try this site. It's riddled with ad pop-ups and its format is practically unuseable, but GMA is hidden in there somewhere, so keep looking. Hopefully they are still up by the time you read this review.
**EDIT: a big BL-loving thank-you to keen-eyed blog reader Shirasade, who has very helpfully pointed out that website Kissasian still has all subbed episodes of GMA available. Definitely check them out there first.
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