Derjk Wu

BLGLFlix editorial view

We have written on several pages here that Taiwan has no queer production pipeline, only a handful of individuals who keep turning up. This record makes us want to sharpen that, because it is not quite right.

Taiwan does have a pipeline. It just is not a studio. It is a platform.

GagaOOLala is a queer streaming service, and on this evidence it does not only license and carry titles, it produces them, repeatedly, with the same producer. Five consecutive queer productions from one person, with the platform’s own name in the production company field and its founder beside him on the credits, is exactly the standing arrangement we said Taiwan lacked. The difference from Thailand is who owns it: GMMTV is a general entertainment studio that also makes Boys’ Love, while this is a queer platform that makes nothing else.

Our own read is that the platform model explains the shape of the output better than any other factor. A general studio commissions to a format because it needs a slate that fills a schedule. A queer platform commissions to an audience it already has a subscriber list for, which is why this record contains a Girls’ Love drama, a Boys’ Love drama, a dating show and a novel adaptation about infidelity. Nothing here is trying to be the same thing twice.

The Warner Music credit on First Note of Love is worth pausing on too. A major record label putting its name on a Taiwanese Boys’ Love series is not the behaviour of an industry treating this as a niche.