Bed Friend is basically a friends-with-benefits-to-commited-lovers drama, and the audience is given many scenes of excessively toned young men kissing and caressing each other.
It is hot but after awhile, it begins to feel like filler.
I'm not a fan of Bed Friend mostly because I'm not a fan of protagonists who suffer from every single drama problem in the world: awful parents, pedophile relatives, cheating boyfriends, stalker bosses...I start to feel the same way I do when Christie movies reproduce all the murders within one of her books. In the book, all the murders make sense. On screen, they start to feel fake and contrived.
The couple from Bed Friend have okay chemistry. But as I mentioned, after awhile, the make-out scenes leave me pondering the value of filler in producing series with way too many episodes: Ah, yes, time to pause and have the hot guys kiss and fondle each other.
I watched Stay By My Side right after Bed Friend and was struck by the erotic delivery of the very simple scene where Buxia and Jiang Chi kiss while Buxia's eyes are covered.
And I began to ponder the difference.
I concluded that chemistry in make-out scenes comes down to personality--that is, the best erotica preserves the characters' personalities during those scenes.
Semantic Error tends to stand above the rest anyway. But it is helped by the two protagonists entirely remaining who they are during the make-out scenes, so much so that Jaeyeon and Sangwoo's kiss at the restaurant occurs after Sangwoo heaves an enormous sigh about how complicated his life has gotten. After the kiss, "my life must have order" Sangwoo bolts; Jaeyeon mutters, "That damn punk" and goes after him.
Chance to Love
Can and Tin again--they strike me as almost entirely unique since they don't deliver the usual "look at the heavy make-out session" scenes, even in the bedroom. It's hard to know if the decision here was the director's or the actors' but they don't behave quite like anyone else, not even characters within the same series. (At the risk of getting salacious, Tin tends to go for the neck rather than the lips, which is a difference in and of itself.)
Love is in the Air
The erotica in Love is in the Air comes the closest to HBO (none of these BL shows approach the raunchiness of American cable television). The two young college students are quite assertive in the make-out sessions, and I find the psychology behind Sky's behavior quite believable.
Sky's current boyfriend, Prapai, not only can keep up with Sky, he feels no competition with the slightly younger man. He is gratified and enchanted by Sky's physical passion, not resentful. Psychology here plays a role.
Dear Doctor
Dear Doctor is the most focused on an evolving relationship. Like with My School President, the closeness between the characters is so apparent in the early episodes, the later intimacy is entirely natural show-no-tell. The easy affection between the characters remains their most telling characteristic.
The make-out scene is erotic, however, since the characters seem entirely indifferent to the audience. That may sound like an odd evaluation, but I'm reminded of Notorious: Devlin and Alicia are wrapped-up in their own world as they make-out, all while Devlin is on the phone. Everyone and everything else is mere noise.
Far too much erotica feels like it is being timed--and presented for approval. It is happening because the script says so, not because the characters naturally went in that direction.
Good erotica deceives its audiences better.
