Taro Watcharathon Passorndiloklert

BLGLFlix editorial view

The pairing in his film is credited as “Kia and Taro”, and one of those names is a shortening. His co-lead is recorded elsewhere as Nokia Chinnawat Phattharathanachot, so the production’s own listing has clipped the nickname to Kia. That is a small thing until you try to trace someone. Thai performers are credited by nickname rather than legal name, those nicknames get romanised inconsistently, and productions shorten them further in their own publicity. The result is that a single actor can appear in three sources under three different strings, and the person doing the cataloguing has to decide whether they are one person or three. We say so on the page rather than silently normalising it.

Like his castmates, he has no entry in the major international film databases. Not a sparse entry: none. The only primary-side evidence that he was in this film is the anthology’s own description, reproduced on the series record. Early Thai BL was made as short films and web series by small studios, and a great deal of it never reached the databases that the rest of the world treats as the record of what happened. We index him because otherwise a real credit disappears for want of someone else’s data entry.

What we are not doing is filling the gap with the closest available source. A second 2019 credit is recorded for him, as a character called Giant in Thank God It’s Friday, but it appears only in a source this site uses for cross-checking and never as a primary record, and the cast lists we do accept for that series do not name him. It is quite possibly true. Incomplete cast lists are the norm for Thai productions of that period. But possibly true is not the standard we publish to, so it stays described rather than asserted.

The broadcaster is worth a second look. Thank God It’s Friday is a ONE 31 series from 2019 carrying a boys’ love keyword. One31 turns up elsewhere in this database as a broadcaster running a quiet, sustained queer slate, and the earliest title on that list is from 2023. This one is from 2019, which pushes the slate back at least four years.

On the anthology format. If I Love A Boy is five self-contained short films, not five instalments of one story, but every database records it as a five-episode miniseries. Read off a credit list, everyone in it looks like a one-episode guest. He carried half of a film. The distinction matters and the film is named here for that reason.