Dale Wu

BLGLFlix editorial view

Three credits, and the same three names keep appearing beside them. Jay Lin, who founded GagaOOLala. Derjk Wu. Dale Wu. All three are on Fragrance of the First Flower in 2021 and all three are on First Note of Love in 2024. This site has now approached that group from four different profiles and arrived at the same place each time: Taiwan’s queer output is not a scene of many independent producers, it is a small standing team attached to a platform that decided to finance its own catalogue.

The company list on First Note of Love is the detail that ought to be better known. GagaOOLala, Portico Media and Warner Music. A global major label is a co-producer on a twelve episode Taiwanese BL series about a musician and the idol he admires. That is not a niche platform scraping together a budget. It is a record company deciding that a queer drama is a reasonable place to put music, which is a different kind of institutional acceptance from the ones usually counted.

Then the small human detail, which is the one we like most on this page. The supervising producer of Fragrance of the First Flower also appears in one episode of it, as a wedding hostess. Somebody needed to play the hostess, the producer was standing there, and that is how a six episode series made by a platform’s own team actually gets finished. We have recorded the same compression elsewhere in the region, most starkly in a Chinese series where one person held ten crew jobs. Here it is gentler and more ordinary: a producer stepping in front of the camera for an afternoon.

One absence is worth marking. There is no credit for Dale Wu on the second season of Fragrance, which arrived three years later and ran twice as long. Whether that is a change of role, a change of company or simply an incomplete record, we do not know and are not going to speculate. It is noted because a reader comparing the two seasons will notice it, and an unexplained gap is better acknowledged than quietly smoothed over.