I was still terribly stressed and my stress-watching is usually things I never planned on watching in the first place. I got very lucky with all my choices this month!

TV new

Ballboy Tactics, a Korean BL on iQiyi - Han Jiwon, retired gymnast, meets Kwon Jeongeu, their university's most popular basketball player. It's a very slow, thoughtful drama with a lot of internal dialogue. There's communication and sweetness instead of unnecessary drama and tropey staged scenes. I loved it a lot! There are barely any external obstacles (depending on how you count the base setup of homophobia in sports), it's all in their heads - I found that awesome! I absolutely rec this show. It has only eight 25-minute episodes, and I went through it in two days.

When it rains, it pours, a Japanese BL on Viki - Hagiwara lives in a frustrating sexless relationship with his girlfriend, while his colleague Sei lives with his best friend from childhood on whom he has an unrequited crush. They connect via a wrongly addressed email, and start confessing their problems to each other. There's a lot of talk about sex, which surprised me - it's very blunt and honest for a Japanese drama. There's also actual sex, and I really enjoyed the sex-first-romance-later plot here. Both characters are interesting, and I found the actor who played Hagiwara, Muto Jun, especially good/attractive. It's even shorter than the other one with only 7 25-minute episodes. CW for rape and infidelity.

My watchalong finally started When A Snail Falls in Love, with a few weeks' delay. It's an old cdrama with Wang Kai and Wang Ziwen. I'm enjoying how much more Chinese I understand now than when I first watched this seven years ago. The only thing that confused us is the weirdly unfitting soundtrack. Sometimes it tries to pass the show off as a Bond film (which is fair enough), but other times we were completely unable to figure out why the music was chosen the way it was. Granted, that's not unusual for cdrama, and it's not going to stop us. :) We've seen three eps now, and are mostly just cackling at Wang Kai's character's Bond-esque swoops and saves-of-the-day and general hero-halo awesomeness, at the Sherlockian intuitive leaps of logic of the female lead. So far we enjoy Wang Kai's voice and the leads' combined tall-and-smol-ness. What's not to like? :D

And then the biggest surprise of the month:
Nothing But You, a noona romance cdrama set in the world of sports (badminton and tennis) - a rec from china_shop. When I'm stressed, I tend to drop all my shows and instead watch silly romance things that I hadn't planned on watching. But this one was so good I just tore through it, I binge-watched all 38 eps in three weeks, and I ended up loving it from start to finish. It's a romance between a professional badminton player who later switches to tennis (Wu Lei - you might know him from Nirvana in Fire, or maybe from Sand Sea) and a sports company sales person/executive assistant (Zhou Yutong). He's 22, she's 32, and basically the whole obstacle to their relationship is that she thinks he's too young for her. That sustains the tension for a very long time indeed. :D I personally find both of them very cute (and I say that as someone who was indifferent to Wu Lei's looks before). I am writing up a proper rec post for it and will post it soon. You can watch it on Viki.

Movies

I saw #schwarzeschafe at the theater. I should not go to the theater anymore, the camera movements on the large screen make me so nauseous! I had my eyes closed for the second half. Despite that, I rec this movie. It's a German comedy (a loose sequel to the original "Schwarze Schafe" from 2006), and it's about a handful of very quirky characters whose storylines intertwine throughout the movie during a heatwave in Berlin. It's really hard to describe, and all the trailers are (imho) misleading. What can I say, I enjoyed it, I rec it.