Call me Nicki Minaj because, no, you don't understand... I'm OBSESSED (with 2gether)

Originally, I thought I was going to manage to get this post up a week after the last one, but it turned out that the end of Volume 1 of 2gether by JittiRain ended on a “To Be Continued” moment part way through the story, so, obviously, I had to read Volume 2 to be able to properly make this post. So, instead of this just being about Volume 1, like it was going to be, this is going to cover both Volume 1 and 2.

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So, I watched 2gether before I read it. And I won’t lie, I watched the whole thing twice through in the span of two weeks. I think that says exactly how I feel about the show, and since it was a show that I was Nicki Minaj obsessed with, I ended up Googling it and finding out that there were novels. I then downloaded both Volumes 1 and 2 on Kindle – because they were only available in the UK on Kindle. So, the Amazon listing for Volume 1, it said it was 650 pages… I don’t know how Kindle pages translate to human, physical pages, but that, combined with Volume 2 ended up at about 1,000 Kindle pages in total.

The concept of the novels is basically the same as the show. The main character, Tine, is a self-professed “chic” guy who has dated many women throughout high school has another guy (Green) profess his feelings for him. Tine then thinks he needs to fake date someone to shake off the guy who confessed to him.

Now I just want to mention part of the listing on Amazon:

    “This mission to shake off this huge gay dude out of my chic life starts with finding someone hella hot to be my fake boyfriend. And nobody fits the role as much as Sarawat, the nation’s husband of our university. But things aren’t as easy as I expected. This guy is a pain in the ass. He’s playing hard to get, not cooperating with me. Ha, I won’t give up that easily! Constant dropping wears away a stone. I’ll stick with him like a suckerfish, just wait and see. But…as I’m pestering him, why the heck is my super chic heart starting to flutter when I’m with this straight-faced dude...?"

Now, because I had already watched the show, I knew what was coming – a lovely fake dating story. And that was more or less what the book was, although, book Tine and Sarawat were much pricklier to one another than show Tine and Sarawat. The book came off as both fake dating and enemies to lovers because of that, which I wasn't entirely mad at.

Tine initially comes off as quite conceited, even a bit of an asshole – then again, he refers to himself as “chic”, so what was I expecting? It also felt like Tine was more resilient to the idea of fake dating Sarawat in the book than he was the show. There’s one point during the book and the show where Sarawat messes with Tine’s social media, and in the book, there were fully parts when I thought that Tine was going a little far, to the point where I had to stop for a moment and just thought, “Damn,” to myself.

Most of the events of the books and show were the same, like most other adaptations. There were a few bits in the books that weren’t in the show, obviously, since they weren’t going to be able to fit everything in. For the most part, it wasn’t anything major, the majority of the differences were just little things. Although, there were a few larger ones: In the books Sarawat gets Tine to help paint his room, whereas in the show it was just cleaning. The bit in the book where Tine agrees to be Sarawat’s actual, real, boyfriend was in a cinema, whereas in the show, I think it was just at a Music Club event. Oh, and in Volume 2, there’s just a whole ass sex scene that, I can’t lie, I didn’t think it was all that realistic… So, the show was definitely softer and fluffier than the books.

There was a point, in the final chapter of Volume 1, where Tine’s friends notice that Green is no longer bothering Tine, so they suggest that they make a plan to get rid of Sarawat for Tine. And, in the show, we sort of see this – or at least, we see the point where Green stops bothering Tine and Tine’s friends suggest that he doesn’t need Sarawat anymore. But in the book, when this was happening, there is explicit mention in Tine’s internal monologue that he’s at the point where he doesn’t want to lose Sarawat from his life. So, we, as the readers, get this explicit mention, whereas, in the show, we don’t get anything explicit, only unsure looks from Tine. So, I definitely liked that there was that explicit mention within the books.

Now, there were parts of the show that felt like I was watching a fanfic, and I sort of got that feeling in the novels as well. I noted down, on page 52 of 663 (of Volume 1), there’s just a full-on keyboard smash. So, that was the main part where it sort of felt like fanfic too.

I will say, too, some of the word choices… Mary, they weren’t it. The book, for the most part, has Tine’s internal monologue, and there are parts where he gets surprised as say, “frick”. And if I didn’t already love the show, I would have absolutely hated that word choice. There were also a few lines that just came out of nowhere and seemed completely irrelevant to anything. On page 73, after Tine accidentally destroys Sarawat’s phone, he (Tine) is just on his laptop and there’s just the standalone line, “I’m addicted to social media”, that is in a paragraph, but it just came out of nowhere.

Although, on page 427, Tine calls Sarawat a human version of a ham sandwich… Do I know what that means? No, but I thought it was a good line.

And even though I am yet to mention it, the novels were clearly translated from Thai into English. I knew that going into reading, so I wasn’t expecting perfect syntax going in. And the syntax was… crunchy at best, shall we say? Like, I’m sure it reads perfectly in Thai, but in English… It wasn’t the best.

I will say, Volume 1 is definitely the worst offender. Volume 2 was mostly okay. There’s a point in Volume 1 that, I’m not 100% sure if it was down to the translation, but there were paragraphs… Which I realise is like the bare minimum. But in the paragraphs in the chapters, they would occasionally just jump to another scene and I wouldn’t realise until I was reading the paragraph and thinking it didn’t really make sense. Both volumes, honestly, could have done with more obvious breaks. You know how books will often break up its chapters with a line of asterisks? It could have done with those.

Like I said, Volume 2 wasn’t anywhere as bad, syntax-wise as Volume 1, although, there were a few chapters that were just all in bold, and I wasn’t sure why… At first, I thought it was because those chapters had switched to Sarawat’s perspective, since the first bold chapter was his. But then the book switched back to Tine, and was still in bold.

Also, because I had watched the show, at the point the story was at in Volume 2, I knew that Tine and Sarawat had moved in with each other, but, unless I had missed it within the books (which is entirely possible, I won’t lie), I didn’t actually realise the two had moved in together in the book until page 99 of Volume 2 where it just explicitly says, “our place.” Again, the book might have mentioned them moving in before then, and I could have just missed it, but that mention of “our place” did seem to just jump out.

And then at the end of Volume 2, there are five mini “specials” that as I read them, I realised that they were what made up the companion series to 2gether (Still 2gether). They were fine, but I think I would have preferred those mini specials to have been interwoven with the main story, like they were in Still 2gether, as opposed to little extras on the end.

Anyways, that’s it. To close out… I’m just going to explicitly say that I prefer the show to the novels. Maybe it had something to do with the fact that I watched the show first and was so enamoured with that, or maybe it was the crunchy translation and syntax, I don’t know. If you liked the show, I’m sure you’ll at least be able to appreciate the books. I did. Although, I do think that if I want to experience the story of 2gether again, I’ll just re-watch the show for a third time which, let’s not lie, I’m probably going to do relatively soon…

    Okay, bye!