Fools

Fools, in Vietnamese Những Kẻ Khờ, is a four-part Vietnamese boys' love web series made by AB Studio and posted on the studio's YouTube channel between 16 January and 7 February 2021. Episodes run fifteen to twenty minutes each, so the whole thing is comfortably shorter than a feature film.

Three school friends skip their graduation ceremony and get on a bus without agreeing where it is going. The journey takes them to the coast, and because university will separate them in a few weeks, it is the last time all three will be in one place. Feelings none of them has admitted to come up on the way. Truong Dang plays Trieu, Do Anh Hao plays Thuy and Nguyen Viet Hung plays Thien.

The episodes are not numbered in the ordinary way. AB Studio labelled them as chapters and gave each one an English subtitle: "To The East", "Facing The Waves", "Glimmering Sunset". The titles trace the shape of the trip rather than the shape of a plot, and they were attached to English-subtitled uploads from the start.

Its place in the calendar is worth noting. Fools went up in January 2021, three weeks after Follow My Sunshine had finished and ten months before O2 Production's Mr. Cinderella began. Both of the studios that would come to define Vietnamese boys' love were still ahead of it, which puts this among the small handful of titles from the period before the scene had any shape at all.

AB Studio is not one of those houses. Its channel carries a small body of work, including an earlier series, Stage of Love, and Fools sits among it rather than heading a slate. Distribution followed the pattern of everything else here: no broadcaster, no licensing, free on YouTube. What separates it from the studio productions is not the platform but the ambition of the framing — four titled chapters, a journey, an ending the calendar has already fixed.