7 Days Before Valentine

To summarize this series, it's Thai BL version of The Butterfly Effect. Sunshine kept on trying to fix his mistake, but every time it backfired. Although this time, the story has a happy ending. This story tackled so many aspects of life. From sexual harassment in the workplace, politics, human rights, gender equality and last but not least morality. It contains so many good messages and they're brought on to the audience eloquently and gracefully. The acting was pretty solid and the visuals were beautiful. The only downside was that they forgot to make it more consistent. At the first episode, they told the audience that Sunshine was the only one who could see Kyu. But then suddenly everyone could. And there was no explanation for the phenomena. This little technical problem made the story a bit inconsistent.

I recently started watching this series, and was immediately captivated. The storyline pretty straightforward: Sunshine makes a pact with a supernatural being, who grants him 7 wishes in order to bring his boyfriend back (very much like Dr. Faustus did with the devil in the classic novel by Goethe, however to a different end), and for this has a price to pay. The price for every wish is to make someone disappear from the world (an idea very similar to the exceptional novel "If Cats Disappeared From The World" by the Japanese author Genki Kawamura, which cost me two sleepless nights). Each wish predictably leads to unanticipated results, which gradually teach Sunshine a lesson about life and complexity. The story is based on the book by Patrick Rangsimant, but (at least the few pages that I read) there are differences, especially with respect to the overall atmosphere. In fact I like the adaptation more. I cannot tell about the actual plot and its ending, since the series is ongoing.

The acting is quite good, and the two main lead characters have great chemistry (according to some research I did, which I am not sure is correct, this reflects their relationship in real life). Despite the reason for it, they definitely are very convincing.

Technically the series is good, the sound background very nice, cut and angles are very good.

Having said that, I do have some criticism as well. I am not a huge fan of over-dramatized stories (you know the one that make you cry all the time). I like emotions to come in finite portions, while here (especially in the last episodes), the drama simply grows and grows. It is not a perpetual whining yet, but I feel that the series would gain more with a touch of down-to-earth objectivity. But this is a matter of personal taste perhaps. The second (rather technical?) thing that bothers me are the countless flash-backs, which not always serve a purpose. I would go for shorter episodes, since rewatching so many scenes again and again in most cases brings no new information.

As a whole, I am really enjoying this series, which gratefully is not another high-school puppy-love BL drama, but explores more aspects of the human nature, and clearly comes from the pen of an author with certain life experience and maturity. We certainly need of those.