LaFolk Ratchanon Khajitpornphun

BLGLFlix editorial view

Lost to Light is a Boys’ Love series about the Thai pop industry, made by an agency, starring newcomers it is launching. That is a tighter loop than it first looks. The characters are performers being assembled into a group by someone who needs the group to survive; the actors are performers being assembled into a cast by a company that needs the show to work. Neither he nor his co-lead had a screen credit before this. The series is, among other things, a five-episode advertisement for the two people at the centre of it, and it is honest enough about the business it depicts that this does not feel cynical.

The casting shape is worth noting because it turns up twice in the same year on opposite sides of Asia. Ultimate Troop put two complete newcomers in front and filled the recurring cast with established Thai names including Mean Phiravich Attachitsataporn and Gunsmile Chanagun Arpornsutinan. Ash, the Hong Kong BL that premiered in August, does the same thing: three newcomers at the centre, veteran screen actors in support. Both productions are betting on unknowns while paying for a floor underneath them, which is not how BL is usually staffed anywhere.

Five episodes is short for the flagship of an agency’s annual slate. It went out weekly on GMM 25, the free-to-air channel most associated with GMMTV’s own BL output, which means an independent camp’s series ran in the same broadcast space as the country’s dominant BL producer. We do not know the commercial arrangement behind that and are not going to guess at it, but the fact of it says something about how much room the format now has on Thai television.

His name is unusually unstable across sources, and we would rather explain that than pick one silently. TMDB records him as LaFolk in one place and LlaFolk in another. His Instagram handle uses the doubled L. English Wikipedia calls him simply Folk. This page uses LaFolk because that is the form TMDB’s primary name field gives, and lists the alternatives here so a reader searching for either can find him.

Two data problems with our main source, stated so nobody repeats them. TMDB records no production company at all for Lost to Light, which is how Ultimate Troop nearly went unmentioned; the credit comes from Wikipedia. And TMDB’s synopsis says everyone quits the group “except Jeng, who chooses to stay by the stubborn Boss Sithian”, which reads as if Jeng and Sithian are the pairing. They are not. Jeng is paired with Mai, and Sithian with Bailiu. A one-sentence synopsis got the central relationships of a romance series wrong, and anyone building a cast list from it would build the wrong one.