By Blue

By Blue (Thai: น้ำเงิน นามสมมุติ) is the pen name of the Thai author of 23.5, the Girls’ Love novel published in print by everY, the Girls’ Love imprint of Jamsai, and adapted in 2024 into 23.5 the Series, GMMTV’s first Girls’ Love production.

An official English edition was released as an e-book on 4 April 2023, credited to น้ำเงิน นามสมมุติ and TULIP, under the title 23.5 When the Earth is Spinning Around. The Thai edition is carried by the same publisher. The series adaptation premiered on GMM 25 on 8 March 2024, twelve episodes, directed by Kanittha Kwunyoo and written by the three-person team of Naphat Chitveerapat, Lalil Kittitanaphan and Nichaphat Buranadilok.

The book that came before the studio

Two dates are worth putting side by side. The official English e-book was on sale on 4 April 2023. The series premiered on 8 March 2024. The novel was being sold to international readers eleven months before Thailand’s largest studio put a Girls’ Love series on air for the first time.

And the publisher had got there earlier still. everY is not a general imprint that happened to take a Girls’ Love book. It is a Girls’ Love imprint, built for the category, operating inside Jamsai. A publishing house had a dedicated Girls’ Love list running before GMMTV made a single Girls’ Love series.

BLGLFlix editorial view. If you want one page in this catalogue that explains why Thai Girls’ Love looks the way it does, we would point at this one. The received story is that Thai television discovered Girls’ Love around 2023 and 2024, after Boys’ Love had proved the audience existed. The publishing record says something less flattering and more accurate: the readers were already there, an imprint had already been built to serve them, and the studios arrived late, bought the most successful book on the list, and were credited with starting something.

Our own read is that this ordering matters practically, not just as a point of fairness. It means Thai Girls’ Love has a supply of proven stories that television has barely started working through, which is why adaptations keep appearing faster than anyone expects. It also means the genre’s centre of gravity is not in a studio. A studio can cancel a slate. It cannot cancel a readership that was buying these books before it showed up.

One small thing we will not let pass. The series record on the major film databases credits directors, writers, cast, producers and camera crew, and does not credit the novelist at all. The book is acknowledged only as an abstract keyword, based on novel. That is how the person who actually invented the story disappears from the record, and it is part of why this page exists.