Angelina Chiu Kwan-yu

BLGLFlix editorial view

A note on framing before anything else. This site covers BL and GL, and that lens can shrink a performer to the one credit that happens to fall inside it. Her largest role to date is not the BL: it is a Lunar New Year studio feature opposite Dayo Wong and Sammi Cheng, released twice, counting the director’s cut. Worth saying plainly rather than letting the genre boundary do the describing.

Ash is the more interesting entry, and not because of her part in it. Hong Kong has one of the longest and richest queer film histories in Asia and has never really had a BL industry. Ash is a deliberate attempt to start one: produced in Hong Kong, filmed entirely in Cantonese, with a production team described as predominantly local, and pushed out internationally through Youku’s international arm. It is a Hong Kong BL rather than a mainland BL that happens to have Hong Kong actors in it, and those are different things.

The casting is the part to point at. BL almost everywhere is made with young unknowns, because the format is a launch mechanism as much as a genre. Ash puts three newcomers at the centre and then surrounds them with established Hong Kong screen actors, Pat Ha and Justin Cheung among them. Whatever the series turns out to be, that is a production spending real money on a supporting cast, which is not how most first attempts at a national BL scene are staffed.

Now the caution a reader deserves. Almost every name in Ash exists in two romanisations and the sources do not agree on which to use. TMDB indexes the cast in Mandarin pinyin, so the leads are Yi Xuan, Peng Ziye and Li Zesheng playing Mo Feihuan and Xu Lvetao. English-language coverage uses the Cantonese forms, so the same people are Kingston Yi, Leo Peng and Sing Lee playing Mok Fei-foon and Hui Leuk-to. Her own character is Su Qinglian in pinyin and no Cantonese form could be located, so that is the only version this page can give. For a series whose entire premise is that it is Cantonese, being catalogued in Mandarin is an odd fate.

There is also an unresolved conflict on the producer. English Wikipedia credits Tongmeng International. TMDB credits DreamReunion International. These may well be two renderings of one Chinese company name, but that cannot be demonstrated, so this page names neither as fact and records the conflict rather than papering over it.

One structural note. Night King exists twice, as a theatrical release and then as a longer director’s cut, and that is increasingly common across this genre: Chinese titles released as both a short series and a film, Korean ones released as both a feature and a web series, Thai ones with a separate uncut streaming version. A database built on one record per work has to decide what to do with that, and the industry is not making it easier.