The Love Mechanics book was certainly an experience

 

This isn’t the first book that’s also a BL series that I’ve read, but Love Mechanics by Faddist is actually the first BL book that I’ve read before watching the series. The other four (I think) BL books that I’ve read and talked about on this blog, I’ve read because I had seen the series, but this one, I know of the series, also called Love Mechanics – a shock, I know – that I’m pretty sure stars Yin and War, I haven’t actually seen. I will be spoiling parts of the book in this post, so be wary of that.

So, this book doesn’t really have much of a blurb, but I will share what it has in place of a blurb.

“It always ends up this way, where he walks away and I am left with nothing. I should feel happy that he once seemed interested in me, and that I could spend time with him. But in the end, when he disappeared, I have nothing left but suffering.”

Very dramatic, but tells me nothing about the book, so I’m using the mydramalist.com listing of the show: When a Junior woos Vee’s friend, Vee, swearing to love only one in life, has to cut ties with Mark. But God plays a joke on them and something happened between Vee and Mark. Mark chooses to draw an end to it, but Vee doesn’t want to end it with Mark. Mark loves Vee, although he knows Vee has a girlfriend. Will the love between them make it?

Now this at least tells us something about what happens. Like, it suggests that something happens, clearly it does. From the synopsis I got the vibe that the “something” happens between Vee and Mark fairly early on and then they have to deal with the repercussions afterwards. I did assume that since this is a BL book that they would sleep together close to the start.

And I’m going to tack this bit here, because it won’t seamlessly fit anywhere else. I don’t have a lot of positive things to say about this book, so… take from that what you will.

The book opens on a prologue which is basically just Mark, very drunk, admitting that he really wants this guy, Bar, but this man that he’s leaning on isn’t Bar. That’s basically the prologue. Chapter one jumps to Vee, also drunk. Anyway, Mark and Vee sleep together in this first chapter, and I won’t lie, them having sex is the majority of the first chapter. The logic they went on was that Mark wants Bar, Bar is Vee’s friend, so therefore Mark had to sleep with Vee to get to Bar. Absolutely feral concept, but Faddist’s universe Faddist’s rules I guess. Chapter two has Mark seeing Bar officially in a relationship and sad. I will say, for how many pages these chapters were, not a lot happened. I will give the book that there’s a lot of talking, so you get an idea for the characters’ voices, even if a lot of them sound the same. Although, I don’t want to put that down to the writing as it could well be down to the translation, and their voices literally getting lost in translation.

One thing that part of the BL world has been known for is that sometimes the terms “husband” and “wife” will be used, and boo, tomatoes, boo! This book did use them, so that was disappointing. The point of same-sex relationship, surely, is that there is nothing like that, and I’m personally over hearing it myself. Still, certain BLs love a good trope, and this one was no exception. In the third chapter, we have the damn beauty pageant that a bunch of Thai BLs set in universities had for an era, but the main take from chapter three was Mark messaging Vee something regarding the outcome of the pageant that made Vee start thinking about Mark more. Also, Vee does that thing where he assures us that he’s happy in his relationship with his girlfriend, Ploy, despite the fact he had already slept with Mark at that point.

Something I really loved, very much made me that Lady Gaga gif where she’s like, “I have to laugh”. Vee literally says to the reader that he’s not cheating on Ploy, despite sleeping with Mark, because he “doesn’t like Mark”. And I mean… that’s why I had to laugh. Baby, cheating is cheating. It doesn’t matter whether he liked Mark or not, he still cheated. It just gave me a little chuckle. It was very much, “Okay, you tell yourself that, Vee”. And you know what, on that line, I did find myself laughing at this book from time to time. I don’t think it was written to be funny, but there were several points where I was just laughing to myself.

Also, I feel like this is asking a lot of a BL book, but I could have done with a bit of backstory about Mark and Vee, just a little more than the book gave. Like why should I root for them to be together? This is something that I’ve noticed happens with BL sometimes. It’s one of those genres that you can tell some of the authors (fuck MAME while we’re at it) just write BL to watch guys kiss, but then there are some that do it to tell a story that just happens to have guys kiss. To tie is back to this book, there was some back story, but I just needed more, like, why should I care about these characters and why should I want them to be together? This book was missing that. It very much came off as one of those that came off as it was written just to make boys kiss.

I mentioned the translation earlier. I’m not going to comment on the translation of the book, like the quality, because this is now, I think, the third Thai translated BL I’ve read (2gether and Theory of Love being the other two) and their translations were a little rough in places, so, as awful as this sounds, I wasn’t expecting everything in this book to be worded perfectly, and it wasn’t. But again, I’m not counting that against it, given the others I’ve read.

There were some TikToks that people made about whether they thought couples from BL and GL series stay together after the series, and every one that included Mark and Vee always said no, and to be honest? After reading this, I see why. There were definitely moments where I was wondering why do they want to be together? Because even within the book, it seemed like there were people who were better for them than each other, especially in the first half. And to be honest, I don’t really know whether I can say that they got better throughout the book. Like, Vee was a moron, he cheated on Mark. So, even though I knew they were going to end up together, I really wasn’t rooting for them, I can’t lie.

Even in terms of conflict, this book didn’t innovate anything. Like I mentioned in the last paragraph, Vee cheats on Mark, there’s some conflict. They both get jealous of each other, there’s some more conflict. Then we do find out that Vee’s father, ever since Vee’s brother started bringing home more guys, has pinned his hope on having grandchildren onto, so you do get that cause for conflict in Vee and Mark’s relationship, but that never gets brought up after being mentioned once.

I know this was a romance book, but I even with BL romances, out of the novels I’ve read, this was the weakest. 2gether had fake dating spurred on by a reason and Theory of Love had one friend in a friend group being in love with another in the group, then that switching when the first wanted to get over the other. This just didn’t really have anything. Like I mentioned before, there was no reason for Vee and Mark to end up together.

So, yeah, I didn’t enjoy the book. But I’m keeping it on my shelf, given what I paid for it. And even though I didn’t enjoy it, I’m still probably going to watch the series, just because, even though I wasn’t a fan of what happened in the book, I feel like the series might be able to execute things better. Also, from what I remember from Theory of Love in terms of book vs series, the series gave the characters so much more personality than they had in the translation of the book, so I’m hoping that the Love Mechanics series will be like that. Side point, I feel like series often execute side couples better than the books have done.

Okay, bye!