My Goofy Deskmate

My Goofy Deskmate, in Vietnamese Thằng Ngốc Bàn Bên, is an eighteen-episode boys' love web series made in Vietnam and released on YouTube between 23 May and 17 August 2023. Oril Nguyen directed. Episodes are the shortest in this catalogue's Vietnamese holdings, ten to fifteen minutes each, which puts the whole series at around three and a half hours spread over nearly three months.

Dieu Bong and Huu Bang, played by Tran Vi Hao and Dang Tuan Kiet, are childhood friends who sit beside each other in class and have never established what they are to one another. The series stays close to ordinary school life and does not import a crisis to force the question. A second pairing runs alongside them among their classmates, with Sy Tay as Thien Ly and Kai Bie as Binh An.

No production company is recorded. This is the one title in this group that cannot be attributed to a studio, and the omission is left as it stands rather than filled by guesswork. What can be said is where the episodes appeared: on Phim Đam Mỹ Hay Nhất and Come Out - LGBT Việt Nam, two Vietnamese YouTube channels that publish queer drama from various sources rather than producing under a single house name, and whose uploads for this series carry an #MCVPride tag.

The English branding is where the record becomes genuinely awkward. The uploads carry the series as "My Goofy Deskmate" and also as "THE PROMISE SERIES", the latter appearing in the title of almost every English-subtitled episode. That second name belongs to a separate Thai production as well, and the collision has already caused at least one specialist index to file a Thai series among Vietnamese titles. Both names are recorded here so that the confusion is visible rather than inherited, because a viewer searching for either will turn up results for the other.