Korean BL Color Rush leaped onto the scene at the VERY end of 2020 and blew my mind. Despite being a typical K-BL short run of short episodes, it was given more legs than 2020′s Mr Heart or You Wish with a strong core concept even with 8 episodes of only around 15 minutes each. Color Rush (with a total run time of c. 2 hours) felt more like a movie than a series and managed to satisfy me because of this cinematic approach.

It drew heavily on yaoi manga staging and storyboarding, we can see this in many of the over the shoulder shots, actor stances and postures, and framing techniques. Since I love this style, it contributed to my enjoyment of the series without distracting me.

It also broke ground in many ways for BL:

1. It neatly avoided some of the pacing issues of K-BL with a magical realism component that forced intimacy in the first episode (in-world justified use of the fated mates or soulmates trope).
2. They cast a known (former) K-pop idol in the seme role - Hwall from The Boyz. Not all that unusual (see Wish You) but they gave that idol a near perfect role for him and he executed it beautifully. He is a dancer by training and the role required him to do most of his emoting via physicality.
4. It was concept driven, in that it had a strong fantasy component, like Cherry Magic. However, Color Rush used the fantastical as an aspect of visual story telling (Cherry Magic was audio) which allowed it to be less soft, sweet, cute and more tense, sinister, dramatic.
5. The narrative backbone was an insanely perfect allegory for queer first love and the coming out experience without beating us over the head with it.

Thai BL may be my stan, but Color Rush is my bias, and it topped my list of BLs to beat going in to 2021. Okay I’ll stop using K-pop lingo now but basically I really flipping LOVED COLOR RUSH.