#Just wanted to essay my love and appreciation for all the work put into cheshire that I've been able to unravel

[redpiperfox]

I love Mera.

She never fails on a video essay of dissecting the obvious and sounding like a poet blessed by the muses while doing it. And she makes me think, which I find harder and harder to find in youtube videos (...or maybe my class of youtube videos has become stale and needs to be revitalized, idk)

This video in particular, did a brilliant job of laying out Itzy’s image as it’s given to us through it’s music videos, and called me out as writer by showing why we see the members in a certain way due to their music video coding. But more than being stunned that the characters I draw from them to write about, it validated and inspired me, and gave me direction for the personas I had created from their coding palette. It felt like a library archive, some secret wisdom I had stumbled on as a fanfic writer... 

Now. I don’t often stand to disagree with Mera. She’s brilliant at what she does, and I am learning from her every time I watch her videos. She’s much wiser and more educated than I, and it feels like an honor to sit at her feet and listen to her speak. 

...but I feel the need to be in defense of Cheshire.

The core of Mera’s video had been member coding. She took the cinematography and laid out how it presented each member-- a brilliance in the way that Itzy’s core of different and unique and self-confidence stemmed from individuality, and tangibly allowing the audience to feel that with each member. From the costuming, to the camera angles; from the sets to the storylines. The status quo can be rejected, and it doesn’t have to look the same; Ryujin the in-your-face, anti-authoritarian punk; Lia the queen bee, glittering high class in playfulness; Yeji and her feline maturity, aloof and unaffected; Chaeryeong with introverted confidence, girl-next-door, the quiet but no less strong (I... might’ve gotten emotional during this section); Yuna the teenage hero, pop-star-by-night, bubbly, comfortable-in-her-own-skin persona. If I started thinking too hard, I started wondering--

https://twitter.com/redpiper3/status/1610070731932553220?s=20&t=2N_36_XfCJ3X9zGrldQacw

But that’s besides the point.

After Mera properly dissected and laid plain the coding Itzy had debuted with, she laid plain the tracking of this coding through her eras: the debut trilogy cementing their image and personalities as individuals, being vital to their identity as a girl group; the costume era struggling at first and at the tail end, but experimenting with it in new lights, and finding a brilliant visual playground in MITM; and then the shortcomings of the newest era, which floundered in Sneakers, done right in Boys Like You, and seems to break coding in Cheshire, allowing them to seemingly evolve as a group, and take a new direction.

Now, I will not say Sneakers was anything short of a Mess. I remember being glamoured by the costuming and ideas for sets, and then watching on twitter as everyone tried to pin down what exactly JYPe was doing-- a historical concept? Tracking strong independence through the ages and... ending on a sneakers commerical? Was this a branding deal gone bad that they had to rescue?

It feels, after seeing the Cheshire album come out, that something unexpected happened after the ten months of preparation. Their japanese titles were nothing short of brilliant (chef’s kiss at Voltage and Blahx3) but the Checkmate and Cheshire albums were... haphazardly done in planning. I have my suspicions about them feeling like they were supposed to be a full album together... Sneakers would have been a brilliant promoted b-side next to Cheshire: a bright summer song for the group while still maintaining their growth and maturation with Cheshire. Further, their promotional styling being similar before the album release... is suspicious. I have a sneaking suspicion that making Mama 2022 their comeback stage, and having a single release of Boys Like You that played in a different genre and soundscape probably influenced the Checkmate release to be what it was. They needed something before they went on tour, and the Checkmate album-- minus a few gold tracks-- gave them plenty to work with, and prepped the audience enough for Boys Like You. Mera compares Boys Like You to Blackpink’s release of Ice Cream, for trying a different color and taste with the freedom of a western release, and it’s almost for that reason I think the company might have pre-emptively struck with Sneakers-- I’m not into Blackpink and their fanbase, but I think I remember the general reaction of the public being confusion and rejection of Ice Cream due to the strong ongoing themes the group had. And if Sneakers is nothing else, it’s a play with the public. 

Now, I am also going to assume that budgeting works like this-- Sneakers had expensive and shiny sets, and Mama pulled certain budgeting, and between time and money between a world tour and preparing for year end stages, the filming of Cheshire was just between a rock and a hard place. I... am probably wrong, but that’s the kindest assumption I can give to the company :)

So with all that in mind-- Cheshire.

Mera noted in her video that Cheshire leaned more into the flashy editing and the concept of “true or fake?” and group styling similarities more than their general member specific coding and the usual showing, not telling, of individuality. She thought the group is maturing, evolving, and doing away with their original debut codes to do it, seemingly meshing with the rest of 4th gen girl groups, but still standing out because they’re Itzy, and everyone knows them, and they’re on top of the generation anyway-- all of which I can agree with.

Something could be said about the company sending out feelers whenever they feel their girl groups are getting stagnant in concepts and want to try and mature them... something could be said. We won’t say it here.

I might have been a little too much in love with Cheshire. This is my sin-- the vocal maturity and the subtlties of it, the playing into each members’ vocal strengths, it all just makes me very happy and excited for the group as a whole and where they’re headed. 

And I can’t stop listening to the song. And watching the video-- first time through I felt... underwhelmed? And not I catch something new everytime I watch it, it truly a testament to subtlety and blink-and-you’ll-miss it messaging. The members don’t seem to own any place of their own, interrupting each others’ sequences and shots, until you watch through and follow each thread.

But when it comes to member specific coding, Cheshire seems to take what we know and play deep into it’s roots, and seemingly turn everything on it’s head as it projects us into the future of this group as it matures. Let’s go member by member, and each “cheshire cat” as they present themselves:

In our game show of discerning lies from reality, Lia has her little corner of comfort, like the princess she is. She’s playing with practical illusions, things that can only be see properly from the correct angle, and she’s playing with facial expressions that make it hard to pin down what her intentions are or how she’s looking at us. There’s something cynical and mean about her from her first scene... darts fall into her set and we’re brought to Yeji’s set.

Later, a piano drops and shatters in the middle of her set (another non-CGI effect) where she tells us she’ll give us a hint and she’s interrupted by MC Yuna, who’s telling us to watch closely. 

We move past the game show into the world of the cheshires-- Lia’s is surpringly calm next to some of the other members, giving a disinterested vibe through a computer shot. 

But the important scenes are the ones we end on, where we revisit the members in their initial solo sets, and Lia is lying on the couch, everything a mess around her, and we dive into her mind through her ear. There’s rubble falling on top-- this is right before the piano had dropped. It seems like it’s going to drop right on top of her!... except we know from the earlier scene-- she isn’t there. Her final set shot is the piano destroyed at her feet, and her looking up from where we’ve been watching.

It’s just a trick. Lia’s played with us. 

Yeji has one of the more key roles in the plot of the music video, and unlike loco, they aren’t using the grand sets and obvious styling to scream CAT! CAT GIRL! CAT WOMAN! in our faces. 

They use the more subtle web-plucking.

She’s introduced top down on Lia’s set, and she’s throwing darts at a dart board, in a cute little set-up that spells out YOU. She’s hard to pin down, and she’s playing with the audience the entire time. She steps into the middle of Yuna’s curtains pulled back to peek into Chaeryeong’s scene, she’s popping on all sides of the frame in the office scene, and she’s the one who pulls the plug of this operation when the illusion goes way over our heads. You could even say she’s the top down shots looking at Lia-- maybe she dropped the piano herself.

Yeji’s running this operation. 

Out of all the girls, she’s the one who’s directly looking into the character, directly taunting the viewer, deciding when they’ve gone too far into the illusion, when they haven’t looked close enough at one of the girls’ sets, and takes the final bow when all the trickery is finished. She’s in front of the target, twiddling the dart like she could do this all night. She’s the final playful shot before the cat tail teases us, and she’s pulling all the strings.

Ryujin’s speeding down the freeway in her truck, and nothing’s going to stop her.

...except she isn’t.

She’s the first one to tell us it’s not real, her car parked, stand-still in front of the set, as she rolls the windows up on us. Windows, it can be noted, that are covered in stickers. This car isn’t meant for driving at all, but Ryujin doesn’t care.

Ryujin is the cat that spoils the ending, the first to make us question everything. She’s the second computer screen, who deletes the background and shows us what’s fake and what isn’t in their MC group dance shot-- and it isn’t much! Only the question marks and arrows, that had been CGI-ed to confuse us on what was up and down, had been untrue. Everything else on set had been...

Then we get to her cheshire in the snow, and she’s not playing. She’s got an icy playfulness that’s asking “why so serious?” before Yeji pulls the plugs, and then she’s the one right in the middle of the gameshow, spinning the wheel and making us question every one of the initial solo sets. She knows, and she knows we don’t know. Her final shot is her sitting on top of her car, twirling her hair and smirking at us for trying so hard.

She’s taunting us. And she knows we’ll let her get away with it.

Yuna’s the hardest cheshire to pin down-- because she shows us her tricks right from the beginning.

She’s the one running the lights, switching us between the game show and the CGI transition to the cheshire snow world. She’s in front of the curtains, and we don’t know what her deal is, except for one unavoidable fact-- she’s moody. She’s either introducing the game show, or morose and haunting. We don’t know whether to be excited or scared at what’s about to happen, we don’t know whether being fooled should terrify us or enchant us. 

And Yuna wants us to remain in that uncomfortable place of not knowing. 

In her cheshire scene, she’s still playing with lights and shadows, and dancing like a teasing cat. It’s a little scary, but she tells us in this way “someone might find their path.” 

When everyone is playing their final trick, she doesn’t offer us a smile, only throws her arm up to present the acts before stalking off and letting us figure it out for ourselves. There are no light switches, nothing to hide or seek, just what’s before our eyes that we still won’t be able to understand. 

In her final scene, she laughs at us, but she’s not our friend. She’s almost looking down on us.

We’re not friends.

Chaeryeong probably lays it out as obviously as possible in her solo set.

She gets her own room, and not happy: she’s crying, doesn’t want to talk to us, and wants to lie in bed all day. Moving outwards, two members immediately clue us in to know that this isn’t true-- Yeji stands by the curtains pulled back, to show it’s only a set, and Yuna wears identical fake tears to Chaeryeong’s, only to pull them off and show that they’re fake. Chaeryeong even gives us a smile while she wears the fake tears.

Chaeryeong isn’t upset, we’ve just been manipulated into thinking she is. 

As a cheshire, she’s the one who makes us see “true” and “fake” for what it is. She shows a cheery doll can really be something plain and ordinary we’ve been made to believe is something of comfort, and playing catch can seem like a bomb thrown in our face.

Exaggeration and lies. 

She throws her bedsheet up to show she wasn’t even in the room in the first place-- the editing leaving her shadow walking out from behind the falling sheet to let the illusion properly register for us.

In her final scene, she’s having fun jumping on the bed and making a mess of the feathers and pillows, no tears on her face. 

She was actually having fun with it all. On her own.

Now what does this all have to do with anything? I haven’t proven or disproven anything, I’ve just spelled out what we’ve seen. Let’s draw some parallels--

Lia: preppy and pretty and playful-- check, check, and check. 

Yeji: in command and unaffected and mature -- check and check, and I’ll concede the maturity is a little muddled, but we’ll revisit that in a moment.

Ryujin: anti-authoritarian and punk -- well, you try driving anywhere with stickers all over your window. Or taking over a game show by driving your car right into the middle of it.

Chaeryeong: quiet, introverted but with an inner strength and self-confidence -- check, she certainly wasn’t trying to prove anything to us.

Yuna: teenage hero and bubbly and perfectly made for what she’s doing -- I don’t know if you’ve met a teenager, but they’re angsty as hell.

But she’s not quite the dalla dalla Yuna is she? In fact, scrolling back up, none of these are quite the coding of the girls we debuted with in the debut triology are they?

Now, here is where cinematographic coding and members’ personalities and company advertising could all blur, so I’ll only say this before we stay in the cinematography: I’d like to think JYP gives their groups as much freedom as Stray Kids gets, but you never know. But in a perfect world, Itzy played a hand in their own concept building, and their own very real individualities bled through to build their concept. But if it did or not, Dalla Dalla gave them sets and outfits, fit with colors... and then let them build the scene. The attitudes they brought, the way they commanded presence and attention? Music video building after that worked with the energy they brought to the screen. The confidence, the character, the individuality itself. And the girls have grown a lot in the industry and as individuals since then. These aren’t hot rookies with headlining reputations and everything to prove. These are women who’ve established themselves and been burned in their industry a couple of times.

Subtle maturity is a beautiful thing. 

Yuna is still perfectly made for what she’s doing-- only it isn’t showing all of her bubbliness to you. (Side tangent: stop chasing my girl for every little thing she does. She can say “bless me” and cover Love Dive without being put up against impossible standards, alright?) Being in the industry is playing your character close to your chest, and Yuna is made to be an idol. She’s no longer a teenager, but she’s every young girl you know, and she’s impossible to be, and someone only to look up to with awe. 

Ryujin is still the punk who sticks it in everyone’s faces, but now she’s got a driver’s license. She’s not playing your game, she’s making her own. 

Yeji is still mama cat, she’s still cruella, and she’s still the icon of maturity, targeted for the older age group. But she doesn’t need to prove it anymore-- she’s the oldest who’s taking care of everyone, running the show, and she can have fun while she does it. 

Chaeryeong is the girl-next-door, quietly confident in herself, and throwing the stereotype of what we think introverts are so much in our face, it’s almost as though she knows what we think, and has the confidence to rewrite that trope for everyone. (And I love her for it. Mera’s chapter on her in her video made me so emotional, we need to open the conversation about individuality and confidence and strength in the quieter people, and stop trampling over girls who don’t present the way we expect when we see powerful women.)

And Lia is still our princess. She’s got a more mischievious side that’s flaring more now than it did in Icy, but it’s there nonetheless.

The coding isn’t just in the styling, it’s in the subtleties of the members.

And it’s not the same as debut era, it’s growing.

Mera has another video I adore, where she praises Twice and their femininity. Twice as a group matures and their music evolves and tries to find where to go, but the feminine beauty of it remains the same at it’s core.

I think the same could be said of Itzy. Individuality was something they had to scream when they debuted, but now that they’ve told us who they are, and they settle into who they know they are, they show us the nuances and subtle beauties of individuality. 

Individuality doesn’t pretend to be anything for anyone, it doesn’t have to play all it’s cards on the table and show who it really is, it’s full of joy in it’s maturity, and while it can be fully rebellious in it’s own rights, it can also be full of life from the comforts of home, where knowing who you are and being strong in that is enough.