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wielderofmysteries · 2 years ago

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Self-Made Man: Jace Beleren and Representation for Transgender Men in MTG

INTRO:

A few days before I started writing this, I received a message on Tumblr asking me to talk about my personal interpretation of Jace Beleren as a trans man. Not an unusual request, since Jace Beleren is my favorite character and I mention that I think he's trans all the time. I thought my response would be easy to write, but I started typing and couldn't stop. I realized I couldn't keep it short and simple. My thoughts grew into something much bigger, and much more meaningful to me. (Word count: ~9260)

In this post, I'll explore my analysis of Jace Beleren as a transgender man, why I think it enriches Jace as a character, and how it relates to the topic of transgender representation in Magic.

Disclaimer 1: As far as I know, WOTC and the authors who wrote Jace's lore did not originally set out with the intention of portraying a transgender character in Jace. Everything I'm presenting as evidence that Jace is trans is just part of my analysis. The purpose of this post is not to prove that Jace was always intended to be trans, but to show how my personal interpretation of Jace as a trans man is inspired by and supported by the text.

Disclaimer 2: All transgender people are different and have unique lives and feelings and experiences, so the things I say in this post won't apply to every single trans person. The examples I give here are mainly based on my own experience, as well as those of other trans men I know personally.

(General content warning for discussions of bullying and transphobia.)

PART 1: ORIGINS

There's an inherent transness about Jace Beleren.

Insecurity is one of Jace's most visible and defining traits. From Origins to Ixalan, his long-term character arc is all about his struggle to let go of his insecurities in order to become a better version of himself. There are parallels to the experiences of transgender men in the way those insecurities came about, how he expresses them, and how he eventually overcomes them.

It's easy to see why Jace would be insecure. As a telepath, he can hear all the negative thoughts other people have about him.

=========

Sure enough, there was his father, sitting at the kitchen table, frowning. Gav Beleren, grubby and balding, regarded Jace with little more than weariness.

I wish he was normal.

His father’s thoughts traced a familiar path.

[Jace's Origin: Absent Minds - Kelly Digges]

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Lack-witted idiot.

A big lug shoved past him from behind.

Jace couldn’t help but agree with the sentiment.

I swear, that Beleren kid…

[Jace's Origin: Absent Minds - Kelly Digges]

=========

There’s the freak.

The biting thought was the only warning Jace got.

He scrambled to his feet and spun, but he was too late. Three of his schoolmates stood between him and the access hatch.

[Jace's Origin: Absent Minds - Kelly Digges]

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Jace's own father, despite caring for his son and wanting a better life for him, felt little warmth for him. He wished Jace were "normal" and often became frustrated with him. Jace was a victim of brutal bullying that started in early childhood and continued all through his school years. Even complete strangers disliked Jace, and they made it known.

It was difficult for Jace to tell which thoughts were or weren't his own. Jace's constant awareness of others disliking him caused him to internalize that negativity, and as a result, he developed a sense of insecurity at an early age.

Jace's insecurity manifests as self-hatred, feelings of inadequacy, and discomfort in his body and physical appearance. I think his insecurities manifested in these specific ways because one of his most significant personal struggles was gender dysphoria. In an R&D video about Jace's story in Origins, Kelly Digges spoke about Jace's insecurity, and unintentionally gave the most transgender-sounding response possible.

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"Not everybody likes Jace. They see the arrogant self-assured kid wearing the hoodie, and something about that doesn't sit well with them. But I think you've got to have sympathy for the guy. I mean, imagine being a teenager with all the awkwardness that comes with that, and actually knowing that the person behind you thinks your hair looks stupid! You'd put on a hood too!"

[Kelly Digges - Magic: The Gathering - Inside R&D Magic Origins: Jace]

=========

The thing is, I don't have to imagine that situation. That was literally my lived experience as a trans teenager.

I had known I was trans since I was very little, but I didn't decide to start living life as an openly transgender boy until I was 13 years old– right before I started high school. The day before my freshman orientation, my mom took me to a hair salon and I asked the stylist to give me a typical boy's haircut. My hair was waist-length, and the stylist was shocked that a 'girl' could ask her to cut off that much hair. She was scared to ruin my appearance by making me "look like a boy" (even though that's exactly what I wanted.)

My freshman photo was the ugliest school picture I've ever taken. My friends jokingly called me 'Gohan' (from Dragon Ball Z). I started wearing jackets with my hood up, even though I never liked to before, and I wore hats despite it being against the school dress code. I knew other people thought my hair looked stupid, and I knew this without having telepathic abilities like Jace.

But my troubles didn't start with that haircut. Long before I started openly living as a boy, I was told I was a 'tomboy' and that I didn't act like other little girls did. Even in early childhood, I was very aware of the fact that some people hated me for who I was and how I expressed myself. I was just like Jace in that way– knowing who was judging me; knowing they didn't respect me; and knowing that in their eyes I was ugly, a weirdo, or worse.

I had always known I was different, and Jace had always known he was different, too. But it's not for the reason you would think. People mistreated Jace long before anyone knew or even began to suspect his true nature as a telepath. Nobody knew Jace was a mage, but everyone knew something was weird about him. There was something outwardly unusual about Jace that people noticed and thought was strange and undesirable.

Something interesting I noticed while re-reading Jace's origin story is that he appears to be wearing girls' clothing in the art. He and the girl, Jill, are both wearing the same long tunic / dress and shawl; while the two other boys are wearing vests and tucked-in shirts.

I know that wasn't necessarily the intention with this art, but it got me thinking about other aspects of Jace's origin story that just felt trans to me.

Interestingly, nobody in Jace's origin story actually calls him "Jace" except for his mother, the only person who truly loved and accepted him for who he was; and Alhammarret, another telepath and therefore the only person who could see Jace the way Jace saw himself. Everyone else refers to him as "Beleren" or "that Beleren kid" or "freak". His own dad doesn't call him anything at all.

It reminded me of the way my family never got into the habit of calling me my chosen name, even after I came out. They would call me my childhood nickname, "BooBoo", to avoid saying my chosen name or my birth name. To them, I was boyish enough it was weird to call me a girl's name, but not loved or respected enough to be called what I wanted.

Being a trans teenager is hard. It's hard to control your style when you're dependent on your parents to buy clothing. It's hard to control your identity when other people constantly call you the wrong name. And it's pretty much impossible to control your body.

Puberty is a source of insecurity for all teenagers, but it's the ultimate hell for trans teenagers. When the effects of hormones become visible and you see how your body has changed compared to your peers, the difference can be emotionally devastating.

While puberty made me wider and heavier; my male friends, who were going through the other puberty, got taller and more muscular. They got bigger and stronger every year while I was doomed to stay 5'0 (152cm) forever. It felt like I could never catch up– they looked the way I wanted to without even trying. Sure, I could pass for a boy, but they were going to grow up to be men. It infuriated me.

Similarly, Jace's lack of stereotypically masculine physical characteristics was a major source of self-hatred.

=========

“Hey, Beleren,” said the largest of the three, his booming voice overpowering the wind. His name was Tuck. At fourteen, he was a year older than Jace, a head taller, and built like a loading dock.

[Jace's Origin: Absent Minds - Kelly Digges]

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How small he looked, hanging desperately above the crackling stream of mana. How vulnerable he looked. He hated it.

[Jace's Origin: Absent Minds - Kelly Digges]

=========

Jace's male peers are described as being significantly taller and more muscular than him. This difference in size and strength made it easy for other boys to bully and physically abuse Jace, which caused him to associate their masculinity with the power they held over him. In Jace's mind, being a victim meant he was weak, and being weak meant he was less of a man. Hating yourself for things you can't control is extraordinarily painful.

When Jace discovered his true nature as a telepath, he realized it was the one way he held power over others. He tried to feel tougher and more masculine by emulating the way his bullies demonstrated their power over him– through intimidation, cruelty, and threats of violence.

=========

He looked Tuck in the eyes. “And if you harm my family, I’ll take your mind apart, one squalid little memory at a time.”

Tuck flinched.

[Jace's Origin: Absent Minds - Kelly Digges]

=========

Having grown up without any positive male role models in his life, Jace's idea of masculinity was primarily influenced by the mistreatment he endured. He simply imitated what he saw and he didn't have the emotional support or life experience needed to grow out of that mindset.

As a young trans man reading Jace's origin story, I found the way he resented his bullies and retaliated against them to be very relatable. It's scary how easily gender dysphoria can turn into toxic masculinity. When you need to try a million times harder than your cisgender peers to be acknowledged as a man, taking masculinity to a harmful extreme can seem like the logical thing to do, especially if you're a younger trans man.

Despite expressing myself exactly the same as any other little boy would (wearing the same clothes, liking the same cartoons, playing the same sports), I was bullied by both kids and adults for daring to think I could be a boy. Once, when I was 8 years old, I stepped up to bat for my Little League baseball team. When the announcer said my feminine name and everyone noticed the long hair sticking out from underneath my helmet, the opposing team's volunteer coaches (the fathers of kids my age!) shouted from their dugout: "There's no way they'll win! They have a girl on their team!" Their players laughed and cheered in response.

That absolutely broke me. Their words taught me that being myself wasn't enough. And if being the same as other boys wasn't enough, then I needed to be more than them. I intentionally became a bully. Picking every fight I could was my way of proving I was more masculine than people thought.

Intentional toxic masculinity in pursuit of gender-affirmation is a very common experience for young trans men. Jace and my younger self acted the way we did because we were trying to mask our insecurity. We wanted to kill the weakness we saw in ourselves, so we lashed out in an attempt to feel stronger than the people who hurt us.

Starting middle school let me get away from most of the people who bullied me. It was the fresh start I needed to stop being such a terror. But a clean slate wouldn't prove to be so helpful for young Jace.

PART 2: PLANESWALKER

At age 15, Jace's Planeswalker spark ignited. He arrived on Ravnica with no memories of his life on Vryn.

In theory, Jace's amnesia would have allowed him to start becoming the person he wanted to be, but he couldn't begin to heal because the scars on his subconscious mind were immediately opened. Being lost and alone made Jace feel vulnerable– the feeling he hated most.

=========

Came out of nowhere. Some poor Izzet experimental subject, probably.

He scrambled to his feet. People were staring at him. He looked as bad as he felt, sweaty and pale and filthy. He pulled his scarf up around his face and dashed to the side of the road.

I’m not an experimental subject. I’m…I’m…

I’m in trouble.

Fine. Table that.

He walked as fast as he could without seeming to hurry. He reached out, carefully, into the minds around him. It was a cacophony, a mad tangle of voices, and half of them weren’t even human.

Vagrant. Thief. Poor kid. Wretch.

His headache was getting worse.

[Jace's Origin: Absent Minds - Kelly Digges]

=========

On Ravnica, Jace had no idea where he was or who he was, and he was suddenly surrounded by more people than he'd ever been near before. After losing the ability to control his telepathy, he was overwhelmed with their thoughts. He didn't know any of the people around him, but he knew they thought he was strange and pitiful.

When Jace noticed people staring at him, he hid his face with his scarf and ran away from them. Jace's first instinctual concern was not that he was possibly in danger, but that people were perceiving him in a way that made him feel embarrassed about himself. Even without memories of being bullied, a part of Jace's mind was still constantly worried about his appearance.

Jace's anxiety in public reminded me of the extreme paranoia I suffered from as a trans teenager. Being seen and perceived was so unbearable to me that I went to extremes to avoid people. I'd stay home or hide whenever possible, and sometimes I became so anxious I would literally run away if I noticed someone looking at me. I've gotten a lot better in the past few years, but I still worry when I'm out in public. I often notice strangers staring at me, and I hate knowing when people are questioning my gender. In certain situations, I'm even worried that someone might hurt me if they notice I'm trans. When you're trans and you've been bullied, just being perceived is dangerous.

That initial experience on Ravnica did instant damage to his self esteem. Jace's discomfort in his body and physical appearance was such a pressing issue that he immediately sought gender-affirming body modifications.

=========

The Jace in front of her was pathetically young.

[...]

The teenage Jace seated in the chair had the look about him of someone who wanted to disappear and wish someone more imposing into his place. His outfit was disheveled, the cut of it unfamiliar. Vraska sensed in the fabric of the memory that this version of Jace had arrived in Ravnica for the first time only days before.

The Gruul shaman's hand was glowing brilliant white. "This your first?" he grunted.

It took Jace a moment too long to answer. "Yes," he said timidly.

Vraska couldn't help but smile at this memory. He was the wimpiest teenager she had ever seen—no wonder he wanted a cool tattoo.

[...]

The shaman leaned over the teenager and drew a line with his finger down Jace's cheek, leaving a brilliant white tattoo in its place. He continued on his chin and arm, and Vraska watched as the shaman diligently painted a braver face on the nervous teenager's own.

[The Flood - Alison Luhrs]

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Tattoos probably aren't the first thing that comes to mind when you think of gender-affirming body modifications, but that was the purpose they served for Jace. Getting tattoos made him feel braver and more grown up, and they made him look cooler and more intimidating to others. All of these were stereotypically masculine traits he desired in the way he presented himself.

In addition to the way they changed him outwardly, Jace's tattoos were a personal declaration of his identity. His tattoos were drawn from one of the few things he could remember after arriving on Ravnica: a set of mysterious shapes and symbols. He didn't know what meaning they held, if any at all, but he decided that they were important to him because they were his.The decision to have them permanently inked on his skin gave him a sense of control and ownership over his body and appearance, which is one of the most important aspects of forming an identity as a trans person.

In his young adult years on Ravnica, Jace made a living as a criminal extorting the rich and famous. For the first time in his life, he could afford to choose his own wardrobe instead of depending on a guardian to provide clothes for him. Jace used this opportunity to exercise more control over his appearance, having clothing designed and tailored specifically to his desires.

The patterns Jace had tattooed on his body would be incorporated into his signature blue cloak. Jace's cloak is the most iconic element of his visual design, and it's important to this interpretation of his character because it's his dysphoria hoodie.

A dysphoria hoodie is a hooded clothing item intended to relieve gender dysphoria by obscuring the shape of a person's body. They're oversized, loose, and usually black or another dark color. Wearing a dysphoria hoodie hides a person's body from others' judging eyes, and allows them to forget about the parts of their body that they don't like.

It's undeniable that Jace's cloak fits this description perfectly.

Jace was extremely attached to his blue cloak. It didn't matter how hot the weather was, or how dirty or damaged his cloak had gotten– he always wore it anyway. And judging by the fact that he canonically had numerous duplicates made, he didn't want to ever stop wearing it. The ability to look and feel mysterious was very comforting to him.

Jace tried to hide his insecurities for as long as he could, but as he grew into adulthood, his problems would grow and change with him.

The novel Agents of Artifice follows Jace's life on Ravnica from ages 19 to 22. Growing up meant the gender role Jace desired to fill evolved from 'boy' to 'man', but Jace had no positive male role models or examples in this formative time.

As Jace's employer and teacher, Tezzeret forced him to use his powers for violence by psychologically abusing him. Tezzeret had an explosive temper and brutally tortured Jace when he failed assignments or hesitated to comply.

Jace's best friend / partner, Kallist Rhoka, showed a sense of entitlement after the two met Liliana Vess. Kallist felt like Liliana owed him attention and sex, despite the fact that she wasn't interested in him because she was already dating Jace.

=========

“You’re a hypocrite, Jace. It’s fine. My own fault, really. I should’ve known better than to take you at your word, when it came to getting something you wanted—the one thing I might’ve found to make this damned place a little better!”

“She was never yours!” Jace shot to his feet, fists clenched. “Never!”

“Because you wouldn’t give us the chance!” Kallist shot back. “It’s not enough that you took away everything I had?”

“Took away … Damn it, Kallist, I saved your life!”

[Agents of Artifice - Ari Marmell]

=========

Kallist wasn't the only man who felt this way. Throughout the book, several complete strangers made it clear that they thought Jace was inferior and undeserving of Liliana's affection, and that Liliana should be with them instead. Other men openly insulted Jace because they didn't see him as a "real man".

=========

“I couldn’t help but notice,” he slurred in a voice heavy with beer, “that you finally sent your scrawny friend packing. That mean you interested in spending some time with a real man?”

[Agents of Artifice - Ari Marmell]

=========

At that point in his life, Jace was still surrounded by men who had very toxic expressions of masculinity, but unlike his teenage self, he had no desire to imitate them. Jace feared and resisted Tezzeret's violent teachings, he disapproved of Kallist's misogyny towards Liliana, and he avoided confrontation with the random strangers who threatened him.

I think Jace's distaste for their attitudes and behaviors shows that his insecurity is truly gender dysphoria and not just toxic masculinity. If Jace disapproved of their toxic masculinity and didn't want to express himself that way, why would he care if he wasn't a "real man" to them? Why did he still feel incomplete as a man? What does being a man mean to Jace Beleren?

Jace wanted to do all the things typically expected of adult men. He wanted to be self-reliant, to be a protector and leader to others. He made himself a protector and financial provider to his romantic partners. He wanted to protect Ravnica and accepted his duty as the Living Guildpact when the role was magically forced upon him. He worked with the Gatewatch to defend other planes and invited them to live in his home. Despite all his efforts, nobody seemed to see that Jace was trying his best.

One of the most common difficulties trans men experience is being infantilized because they're perceived as younger. Trans men often look younger than their cisgender male peers of the same age due to the difference in hormones. Less testosterone means trans men tend to be shorter, less muscular, and have less body hair (not accounting for individual genetic factors).

When trans men lack stereotypically masculine physical characteristics, especially those associated with age and maturity, such as facial hair, they don't get treated with the same respect as other men. (For example, adult trans men are often referred to as 'boys' no matter how old they actually are.)

When Jace's appearance is described in stories, his lack of stereotypically masculine physical characteristics is always noted. He's always described as being smaller and less muscular than other men, and it's repeatedly remarked upon that he's unable to grow a beard.

=========

Rulan was clad much like Jace himself, though he preferred deep reds and purples to Jace’s unrelenting blue and black. And unlike Jace, Rulan boasted a full, tidily trimmed beard.

[Agents of Artifice - Ari Marmell]

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She cast a critical eye up and down his form. Firm, fit, alert, hair combed. She mentally called bull on it. "You can drop the glamour, dear. No one cares."

He sighed, and shimmered as his illusion dropped. There was the real Jace; paler, hair rumpled, eyes sunken from late nights, and his chin tinted by the adorable peach fuzz that almost counted as a someday-maybe beard.

[Homesick - Chris L'Etoile]

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The text shows that Jace experienced infantilization as a trans man. His sparse facial hair is enough to visibly darken his face, but it's referred to as "adorable peach fuzz" rather than a more mature-sounding alternative. In the story Catching Up, Liliana tells Jace that him looking older is "an unambiguous compliment."

=========

"You look older," she said.

"I'm not sure how to take that."

"At your age, dear, it's an unambiguous compliment." She cocked her head. "Have you started combing your hair?"

He smoothed his hair self-consciously, just for a moment, then withdrew his hand. He had, in fact, started combing it. Not that his hair was any of her business. He scowled.

[Catching Up - Kelly Digges]

=========

This aspect of Jace's trans experience caused him to be disrespected in several areas of his adult life. As an adult navigating dating and relationships, people saw him as unattractive and less desirable. As the Living Guildpact, people saw him as unqualified and irresponsible. As a member of the Gatewatch, people saw him as weak and incapable of leadership. Because he was infantilized as a trans man, he was perceived as inherently less masculine, less competent, and less mature. This negative perception reinforced his feelings of inadequacy.

For this reason, Jace was more self-conscious about his appearance as an adult than he'd ever been as a youth. In order for people to treat him with more respect, Jace found it necessary to hide his body with his cloak and to change his appearance with illusions. Jace felt the need to 'pass', and thought being himself was unsatisfactory, especially after he met Gideon.

Meeting Gideon was a major turning point in Jace's emotional development as a trans man.

Gideon was a great example of stereotypical but positive masculinity. He was self-reliant but not afraid to ask for help. He was a leader but tried to uplift others. He fought as a defender, not an aggressor.

Jace saw Gideon as an upstanding person and a good friend. For the first time in his life, Jace had a positive male role model to look up to. It made him furious.

=========

"I'd rather stand," said Gideon.

Jace stood up. It was an error. He still had to crane his neck to look Gideon in the eye, and now the size difference between them was glaringly obvious. He hated feeling small. Hated it.

[Catching Up - Kelly Digges]

=========

Gideon made Jace feel hopelessly insecure about himself.

He was everything Jace wanted to be, and seemed to be perfect in all the ways Jace wasn't. Gideon was super tall while Jace was average height. Gideon was athletic and muscular while Jace was thin and out-of-shape. Gideon was charismatic and a natural leader while people tended to automatically distrust Jace.

Jace both admired and envied Gideon. He tried his best to emulate Gideon's positive qualities, but found it difficult because it was clear to himself and others that it didn't come naturally to him. Jace's presence just didn't inspire others or make them feel safe like Gideon's presence did.

=========

What would Gideon say?

Jace smiled. Of course.

"For Zendikar," he said, raising one fist in the air. It felt thin to him, lacking Gideon's armored fist, his baritone war cry, his iron conviction.

[Brink of Extinction - Kelly Digges]

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"Vanity?" she said. "That's not like you."

He raked a hand back through his hair, which did nothing to calm its random angles. "I should be at my best for team meetings. Project leadership. Confidence. The idea that I know what the hell I'm doing. And why am I telling you this?" He looked annoyed at himself.

She raised one ivory shoulder in a careless shrug. "Who else knows you well enough to understand?"

[Homesick - Chris L'Etoile]

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Seeing the differences between himself and Gideon aggravated his gender dysphoria and reinforced all the manifestations of his insecurity– self-hatred, feelings of inadequacy, and discomfort in his body and physical appearance.

In his time with the Gatewatch, Jace's vision of masculinity had changed to be much more positive, but he was still miserable because he kept measuring his self-worth against an ideal he couldn't seem to reach.

This stage in socially transitioning is emotionally difficult for trans people. It takes time and effort to overcome.

PART 3: CASTAWAY

At age 26, after the Gatewatch's defeat on Amonkhet, Jace involuntarily planeswalked to Ixalan. He awoke on a tropical island with no recollection of who he was or where he came from.

For the second time in his life, Jace had complete amnesia. Just like when he sparked at age 15, his insecurities lingered despite being unable to remember what caused them. He hallucinated illusions of people from his past life, and his subconscious mind projected his insecurities through them.

=========

"You've really done it this time, haven't you?"

This vision appeared whenever the man was struggling at a task.

His shoulders were broad, and his olive skin had a sheen of sweat underneath the shine of his armor. The hallucination was looking over the man's shoulder as he tried to carve a fishing hook.

"Listen, you aren't really suited to this task. Let me handle it." The vision's voice was gruff but friendly.

It came off as condescending.

The man was annoyed.

"I can do it myself."

The hallucination sighed. "You and I both know you're not suited to this. Let me handle it, you go philosophize on the other end of the beach."

"I said I can do it myself." The man let his irritation reach his voice.

"No, you can't. I call the shots and execute, you stand to the side. That's how this works."

The man responded by throwing his hook at the hallucination. It went straight through the figure's eye and landed behind him on the sand.

[Jace, Alone - Alison Luhrs]

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An illusion of Gideon represented Jace's frustration due to low confidence in his skills and abilities. No one ever seemed to think Jace was good enough. His intellect, social skills, and physical dexterity were all constantly questioned throughout his entire life. As a result, Jace never got the chance to prove to the people around him what he was truly capable of.

On Useless Island, Jace was utterly alone and could rely only on himself. Jace succeeded in teaching himself to hunt, fish, and build in order to survive. He was not inept at stereotypically masculine tasks, as people had believed him to be. Over time, he grew a thick beard and gained a significant amount of muscle mass.

=========

"You look terrible," purred a voice from above.

The man moved his hands. An illusion of a woman stood above him. She had raven hair, tired eyes, and a disdainful expression. Her arms were gloved in violet satin and crossed in front of her.

"The muscles are a nice change, but you look awful with facial hair." Her lips curled in a disdainful sneer.

The man shook his head, tears building in the corner of his eyes.

"I don't know who you are."

"Of course you don't, boy."

She looked him over. "You didn't know who I was then, and you don't now. Hard to build trust when neither of us trusts each other."

The man decided to stop caring that this illusion wasn't real. He desperately needed someone to talk to.

"Who was I, before here?"

"You weren't who you thought you were, that's for sure. No one else saw through you, but I did. You were never a leader or a detective or a scholar; you were a frightened child playing pretend."

The man swallowed a lump in his throat.

"You can fool the rest of the world with your magic and illusions, but you could never fool me."

The man wanted to sob. Wanted to go back and sleep. Wanted to starve until all of this went away.

[Jace, Alone - Alison Luhrs]

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An illusion of Liliana represented Jace's gender dysphoria and impostor syndrome.

Despite everything he had achieved so far on Useless Island, his subconscious mind still held feelings of self-doubt. Part of Jace's mind wondered whether or not he was ever truly suited to being a man, telling himself he "looks terrible" and "awful with facial hair". Again, Jace's maturity and experience are denied when the illusion infantilizes him by calling him a "boy" and "a frightened child playing pretend". This vision was an expression of Jace's fear that he was inherently unfit for masculinity and the roles he wanted to fill as a man.

Unlike the first time Jace had amnesia, though, there were no real people around to reinforce his insecurities. Being alone meant Jace had no one to compare himself to. This gave him the opportunity to truly have faith in himself. Rather than trying to copy someone else's example of masculinity, he was creating his own.

=========

The man opened his eyes, and saw a vision of himself standing on top of the water in front of him.

The image had a blank expression on its face, but was otherwise identical to the man himself, standing calmly—impossibly—on the surface of the water.

The man's jaw fell open in shock.

The illusion appeared solid as flesh, and its detail was astonishingly accurate. The man was amused he did not remember his name but remembered the exact details of his own body: muscles toned, stubble on its face, blistered sunburn on its bare shoulders. He even saw its scars—his scars—the little bookmarks of a life well-lived.

[Jace, Alone - Alison Luhrs]

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All the effort he had taken to change himself showed outwardly on his body, and it was very gender-affirming. He was happy to see his muscles and facial hair and sunburn. I don't know how else to say this, but Jace being proud of "his scars" just has super transgender connotations. When Jace saw his scars, he appreciated them as proof of his ability to change and adapt– proof of his survival.

One of the most meaningful and symbolic moments in Jace's story is his decision to leave Useless Island. He built a raft and sailed away, uncertain of his future but determined and unafraid. Among the items he packed for his journey was his old blue cloak, unaware of the meaning it previously held for him. Jace encountered a storm soon after leaving, and all the items he brought with him were lost or destroyed, including his cloak. But he wasn't upset. He didn't miss it. To the Jace of Useless Island, it was nothing more than a piece of fabric. The Jace of Useless Island was comfortable in his body, and had no need for a dysphoria hoodie to hide from himself or anyone else. By letting his cloak be destroyed, Jace let go of his insecurities.

Vraska found Jace washed up on a rocky island and accepted him into her pirate crew. Jace was eager to help, using his tinkering ability to fix telescopes and compasses. He also used his illusion magic to make The Belligerent invisible during a raid, and even fought vampires with the crew.

People need to have loved ones in their lives who make them feel accepted and respected. It's absolutely critical for a person's emotional health, and especially for trans people, whose close support networks are often insufficiently small or entirely absent. When you feel ashamed of yourself because you're constantly being criticized, when you live in fear of the world around you because you're hated, it's difficult even to simply exist. Having just one person who truly makes you feel safe makes a world of difference.

This is why it was so important that Vraska, the only person on Ixalan who knew Jace before his amnesia, didn't judge him based on his past. She didn't try to tell Jace who he used to be or who he should be. The crew of The Belligerent allowed Jace to be himself, and they cared about the qualities he had, not the ones he lacked. This key difference in how people treated Jace on Ixalan is what allowed him to thrive.

In The Flood, Jace fell down a waterfall and hit his head on a rock. The injury triggered a reversal of his amnesia. After Jace got his memories back, he reflected on the difference between his past and present selves.

=========

"I wouldn't have had the strength to climb this a year ago," Jace said with a little bit of pride. "Or if I did, I probably would have passed out halfway up."

"You weren't that out of shape when I last saw you," Vraska teased.

"You're ignoring how often I used to use illusions to make myself look like I was in shape."

Her brows shot up. "Seriously?"

"Oh yeah," Jace acknowledged. His expression was unguarded, eyes still red from emotion, a lighthearted tilt to his lips. Unapologetically human. He grinned. "I used to be a coward."

He let Not anymore hang unspoken in the air between them, and Vraska caught his smile as he turned to ascend the golden staircase toward Orazca, one strong step after another.

[The Flood - Alison Luhrs]

=========

The old Jace was always being compared to others. That Jace hated himself because he could only see himself as an inferior version of other men. He wanted to hide because he felt like he would never be enough. He wanted to be anyone but Jace.

The new Jace unlearned that mindset. He realized the only 'right' way to be a man was to try to be the best Jace he could be. Having room to improve meant he had the opportunity to find joy in growing and changing. He was proud of himself for taking control of his identity and putting in all the effort necessary to transition. On Ixalan, Jace cultivated the strongest body he ever had. That new body made him braver and more confident than ever before. And that new confidence made him happier than he'd ever felt in his entire life.

The resolution of Jace's arc came from his transition. All his life, Jace had wanted people to understand and accept his true self. For people to see his true self, he needed to be able to show them. Jace was able to start healing from his trauma on Ixalan because for the first time in his life, he felt like it was safe and good to be himself, so he lost his fear of judgment and embarrassment. Through that acceptance, he learned to be himself, and to love himself, and to love his transness. On Ixalan, Jace finally became the man he wanted to be.

=========

Jace looked down at himself.

The tan was real. The scrapes, the newly callused hands, the muscles (the muscles!) were all his. Jace felt proud of his body for the first time in his life. He must not lose track of it now.

[Wool Over the Eyes - Alison Luhrs]

=========

PART 4: DEEP BLUE

Jace being a transgender man is not just a headcanon to me. It's a textual interpretation that I believe adds meaning to the story and enriches Jace as a character.

My interpretation of Jace as a trans man is rooted in the way his personal philosophy guides him as a Blue character.

Blue's central theme is "Perfection through knowledge." Blue sees the world and everything in it as a blank slate waiting to be transformed. With the right knowledge, all possibilities can become reality. Jace's expression of "Perfection through knowledge" is his journey to become a better person by understanding himself.

=========

Jace chose his words carefully.

"Existence is adaptation to changing circumstances. The self is an accumulation of what one has learned from those changing circumstances . . . Our agency gives us the means to alter our own path. You are who you decide to be. And who you will become depends only on how you choose to adapt."

[Something Else Entirely - Alison Luhrs]

=========

Jace's personal philosophy as a Blue character is "You are who you choose to be''. He believes that people are defined by the choices they make with their free will, and rejects the idea that the self has immutable qualities. To Jace, there is no pre-determined path or destiny for him to follow. Rather, he continually seeks to cultivate his own identity through change.

In my interpretation of Jace as a trans man, Jace holds these beliefs because they're lessons he's had to learn in order to overcome his struggles and accept himself.

As a Blue character, Jace's core struggle is his desire to understand himself. Jace's life has been a constant quest to figure out who he is. Above all, Jace's thirst for knowledge is a need to understand his potential and his place in the Multiverse.

=========

Jace.

My name is Jace Beleren.

So there was something in there, waiting for him to dig it out.

And who is Jace Beleren? Is he a good man? Is he kind?

He willed away the shape and sat, alone, farther from home than he’d even known was possible.

He’d have to wait and see.

[Jace's Origin: Absent Minds - Kelly Digges]

=========

Having lost so much of his life to amnesia, Jace has often been unsure of who he is or who he should be.

I've always seen the divide in Jace's life caused by his amnesia as a parallel to the 'before' and 'after' periods in my life as a trans person.

When I decided to start openly living as a trans boy in high school, it was like I was being haunted by my own ghost. I didn't know who I was or how to act anymore because everyone around me seemed to see and speak to a version of myself that no longer existed. But I hadn't died, I was just different. I wanted people to see that I was alive and well. I wanted to make myself feel real again.

Like Jace, I was a teenage boy with no past. I needed to rebuild myself, and I had to start from scratch. I wasn't sure what to do with myself, but the one thing I was sure of was that I couldn't look back. I didn't want to. And neither did Jace.

Jace is known for his love of investigation, puzzles, and research, but his past seems to be the one thing he's not curious about. While he does occasionally wonder what his life used to be like, he's never shown a desire to return to that past. He's never put any time or energy into re-discovering old memories or trying to restore some previous state.

When Jace asks himself, "Who am I?", he's not asking who he was before. He's asking who he can be. What matters to Jace is not who you were, but who you can become.

The past is unimportant to Jace, and this belief gives him strength. He expressed this on Ixalan when he vowed the illusions of his past would no longer bother him.

=========

"No more involuntary illusions!" he said, and something in the back of his mind rung with magical affirmation. It would not happen again.

He had control over his mind. He was the wielder of his talents.

[...]

Then a thought occurred to the man.

"Who I was doesn't matter . . . because I get to learn who I am now."

Saying it out loud made it feel real.

"Whoever I was is irrelevant, for I will become whoever I want to become."

He believed that with all his heart.

The man realized what he must do.

He was going to prove to himself that he deserved to live.

The man got to work.

[Jace, Alone - Alison Luhrs]

=========

Jace understood that in order to progress, he had to keep moving forward. Letting go of the past is what allowed Jace to live in the present and to have hope for his future.

This aspect of Jace's philosophy is also an important aspect of trans acceptance. Many trans people struggle with making the decision to transition because they fear it's too late. They may feel that way because of their age, because of their circumstances in life, or because other people will remember them differently. But Jace believes that the person you were yesterday doesn't have to be the person you are today, or will be tomorrow. When you understand this, you understand that it is never too late for anyone to change.

It's in our nature as thinking, feeling beings to want to explore and discover new things about ourselves, but transphobes want us to repress our curiosity. My whole life, I've had to fight back against people who disrespect my identity and want me to submit to their idea of who I should be. Jace shares this experience.

=========

Baan regarded him coolly. "You were bullied as a child."

Jace coughed on his first mouthful of food and struggled to swallow. "I, uh, don't remember my childhood." A dozen unvoiced thoughts flickered behind his eyes.

The Kaladeshi raised his brows. "One need not consciously recollect an event to fall into habitual behaviors determined by the experience. It is not inconceivable that one could forget their entire life. I would safely wager that were that the case, the subject would still tend to make similar lapses of judgement, and would be drawn to associate with the same sorts of people." He waved a hand, the swish of an ox's tail dismissing flies. "The nature of mortals is not so malleable as some would naively suppose. A person of religious inclination will always find something greater than themselves to place their faith in. A criminal will forever remain a criminal."

Jace put his fork down. "That's a very...deterministic point of view, Minister."

[Homesick - Chris L'Etoile]

=========

Dovin Baan expressed beliefs about identity and human nature similar to those of the transphobes I've dealt with. People like them think, "You were born a certain way and you will always be that way. You will never be anything else. No matter what you do, you can never truly change."

But Jace lives in defiance of that idea. Jace knows he's capable of change because he actively chose to become someone new. What he once was, he no longer is. Jace's disagreement with Dovin Baan isn't just a difference in opinion; it's a defense of his existence. When transphobes deny our identities, they deny our reality.

If Dovin believes our identities are set in stone, Jace believes we each hold a sculptor's tools. Whether or not you will change is your choice. But you alone have the power to make that choice, and no one can take that away from you.

=========

She sighed. "I don't know how the Golgari will see me when I return."

Jace shrugged. "You get to decide how they see you."

She looked at him with uncertainty. Jace continued. "How we engage with the world is dependent on how we present ourselves to it. We are continuously adjusting to change because if we fail to change, we fail to survive. By nature of you surviving the hell you did, you have changed into someone wiser than before. By nature of you commanding this ship, you've transformed yourself into the leader you always knew you could be.

"What makes you you isn't your circumstance or your past, but the choices you make in the future. Your ability to learn and adapt is what makes you who you are today, and that is what dictates who you will continue to become."

[Something Else Entirely - Alison Luhrs]

=========

Jace's focus on adaptation and self-improvement reminds me of the theory of gender euphoria; the idea that gender identity is defined by positive feelings and what feels right to a person, not negative feelings and what feels wrong (gender dysphoria). You can't be happy if you only focus on things that cause you discomfort and pain. You need to find things that give you comfort and bring joy to your life.

As a teenager, Jace hated himself for his weakness. He felt like being tough would make him more masculine. But when he grew up and gained more life experience and new role models, he realized that was no longer what he wanted. It may take some time to figure out what you want, and you may even find that what you want will change, but the end goal will always be to become the best version of you.

This process of trial-and-error is integral to Jace's philosophy.

We ourselves must constantly change in order to survive in an ever-changing world. Jace believes we are defined by the lessons we choose to absorb from these experiences. Every time you change, you have the opportunity to learn something new about yourself. You have the opportunity to see how you've become stronger and see what inspires you to live. That is adaptation. That is growth.

Even if you feel like you're not where you want to be yet, in Jace's eyes, you have already proven your identity just by choosing to walk that path. You can't just wish to love yourself. You have to choose to see yourself as someone worthy of love.

Jace wants us to see and appreciate ourselves for who we are and who we want to be, not what we aren't. You're a glass half full, not a glass half empty. Your potential is infinite, not wasted. If you learn to see yourself this way, it's easier to be a happier, more authentic self.

Jace's philosophy is what makes his character development a beautifully resonant trans story worthy of being true trans representation in my eyes.

=========

In that moment, Jace noticed a change within himself. The Jace of Zendikar and Innistrad and Ravnica had a nervous energy about him, persistently bored and disastrously introspective, constantly aware of the chasm of absent memory that was always on his mind's horizon. The Jace without a past was present, alert, comfortable no matter the circumstance and ready to face whatever might come his way. He remembered what it was like to be both, but recognized how much more natural it was to be the latter. In the span of a moment, Jace was surprised at himself, and then realized his earnestness of late, of Ixalan, was not manufactured, nor was his mindfulness something he could only access in a state of amnesia. That was who he had always been. He had just forgotten.

[Glimpse the Far Side of the Sun - Alison Luhrs]

=========

PART 5: REPRESENTATION FOR TRANS MEN IN MAGIC

If that all seems like an excessive amount of explaining for why I believe Jace is trans, that's because it is.

My interpretation of Jace as a trans man means so much to me because there is no actual representation for trans men in Magic. Which is, frankly, really wack.

In 2015, Magic's first ever transgender character, a trans woman named Alesha, was introduced in the beloved Khans of Tarkir story, "The Truth of Names."

In 2018, a nonbinary elf Legend named Hallar was printed in Dominaria.

In 2020, a nonbinary human Legend named Alharu was printed in Commander Legends.

The introduction of trans characters in Magic really ramped up in 2021. Kaldheim introduced an angel who uses Xe/Xer pronouns in the story Know Which Way the Wind Blows; as well as Niko Aris, Magic's first nonbinary Planeswalker. Strixhaven introduced Dean Nassari of Prismari College, a nonbinary efreet Legend. And Strixhaven: A Curriculum of Chaos, the set's accompanying Dungeons & Dragons book, introduced a nonbinary loxodon NPC named Bhedum 'Rampart' Soovij, and a human NPC named Nora Ann Wu, a transgender girl who counsels other transgender students at Strixhaven. The Innistrad: Midnight Hunt story His Eyes, All of Them featured an elderly transgender woman named Malynn.

Early 2022 saw the printing of another nonbinary character, an elf chef named Rocco, in Streets of New Capenna. And a nonbinary soldier named Myrel was printed in The Brothers' War.

Seven years after the introduction of Alesha, Magic acknowledged that trans men exist for the first time ever in May 2022, when the 'Pride Across the Multiverse' Secret Lair Drop was announced, just a few days after I began writing this article.

This Secret Lair Drop had eight cards featuring art, all by LGBTQ+ artists, that showcase the strength of the LGBTQ+ community in the Magic Multiverse. This celebration of diversity was beautiful, heartwarming, and inspiring in its entirety. Notably, it also featured two trans men in its art. In the new art for "Bearscape'', one of the men is depicted with scars from top surgery (gender-affirming surgery to flatten his chest). And in the new art for "Alesha, Who Smiles at Death", Alesha reaches out to support a young transgender man wearing a chest binder.

As a transgender man myself, I'd been waiting forever to see representation for trans men in Magic. I was happy… and then I wasn't. Two nameless transgender men with no lore appearing in the art for a Secret Lair Drop is just not meaningful representation.

The first named trans man to ever appear on a Magic card was Klement, a tiefling introduced in the summer 2022 set, Alchemy Horizons: Baldur's Gate. Don't get me wrong, I like Klement a lot– he's a very cute character and I'm glad he exists. But it's frustrating that he doesn't even exist in the Magic Multiverse because he's a Baldur's Gate character, and you can't actually own a real Klement card because he's a digital Alchemy card exclusive to Magic Arena.

Now that we're in early 2023, Magic is set to have been around for 30 years without ever featuring a named trans man character on a printed card or in a story.

Trans men have remained painfully invisible in popular media, even as the mainstream has gotten a lot better about representing a wide variety of people in the past few years. Magic in particular has done a very good job of increasing representation for marginalized groups. Magic clearly isn't afraid of including trans characters, which is why the lack of representation for trans men is so disappointing and so baffling to me.

Not having any representation for trans men in Magic hurts because meaningful representation for marginalized groups helps tremendously to promote inclusion in the community. Magic has a wonderful community and I feel like its members genuinely try to welcome all kinds of people, but others can't learn to become more accepting of you if they don't even know you exist.

When people talk about making the community welcoming for people of marginalized genders, trans men are often forgotten and left out of the conversation. When I see people discussing matters of marginalized genders in the community, they don't acknowledge that trans men are just as affected by gender discrimination as other marginalized genders. And I often see people (even other trans people) use the phrase "women and nonbinary" when talking about creating safe community spaces, seemingly not realizing that phrase categorically excludes trans men.

If the intention is to be inclusive, I don't know why we'd be excluded. It hurts to think that people say these things because they either don't know we exist or actually don't want to be friends with us.

I'm genuinely glad I've seen so many other trans people and allies connect with each other through the Magic fandom. But it's sad to not feel that same sense of solidarity and friendship. When I talk with other trans men in the Magic fandom, we're often lamenting the fact that there are no canon characters or prominent Magic creators / community members who are trans men. We have nothing to celebrate.

I think Magic's story and characters should reflect its diverse fanbase. The trans men in the Magic community deserve to have our stories told. Not only so others will understand our struggles, but so they can learn to share our joy. I want to show others who I am, and that I'm happy to be me.

Jace's character shows that people are receptive to these stories, and that in some cases, we have secretly been there all along. I'm just hoping for the day we can step proudly into the spotlight.

#MTG #jace beleren #gwunky #analysis

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fallershipping · 3 months ago

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You ever think about a general fandom perception of "Het" or M/F ships?

In my circles, and for a long time since I was very very young, there was always contention with them, and not without reason. Anime and cartoons often depicted female characters as just the "love interest" meant only for romantic interactions, or that the (typical male) MC would crush on another different-gendered character almost obsessively. Back then, some people considered these characters as "getting in the way of my yaoi!!" but the reality was that writers didn't give female characters the same deep and interesting character dynamic an MC would have with a rival. I think this is still happening in fact, especially in the anime that the circles i'm in consume.

And beyond that, hetero-oriented dynamics are forced upon everywhere in media. From advertisements, to movies even where romance isn't necessary, shows, cartoons, video games, anime, everywhere. People who grew up with this have grown to write more queer relationships in media because-- it is tiring to see hetero content being so forced and shoved in your face. (which it is)

And often did I grow up on tumblr and twitter seeing artists grow tired of M/F, joking about it being boring, appealing to only the heteronormative especially if someone else (or canon) gives them kids. People aren't afraid of expressing their dislike or exhaustion with M/F especially when they want to see their favorite characters with dynamics more personal to them.

I can completely understand this.

I was even affected by fandom culture and the exhaustion of media. I was, still kinda am, nervous of things feeling too hetero. Too dull and you never want to stray anywhere close to the archaic 1950s past of a loving housewife and the man of the household. But I do like a lot of M/F pairings, especially this one. I like the concept of two equal partners, I like that it's not about gender roles or that "man has to like woman" but that they are a bit of an odd couple no one expected. And I want to show them off RIGHT, yknow?

At the same time, I'm glad that the perception is somewhat changing from "all het/female love interests are bad" to "bad writing is bad, and I would prefer the author to write a female character just as well as how they write male characters."

How about you? What is your personal opinion when it comes to M/F content shipwise

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yesornopolls · 5 months ago

Note

Not a Question, but-

Hi! I have a confession to make.

I’m the person who submitted the “Is it Immature to Dislike People for Not Liking to Eat Certain Parts of Food” poll question for this blog.

https://www.tumblr.com/yesornopolls/754935312702210048/ex-not-liking-to-eat-the-crust-of-a-pizza

I want to clarify that I’m autistic and have sensory issues when it comes to eating food, so I voted “No” when this poll I submitted came out.

The REASON I submitted that poll was, because, well, I saw a video making fun of people who don’t like eating the crusts of pizza, and as someone who does not eat pizza crusts due to me being sensory about certain tastes and textures within my mouth, I honestly couldn’t help but feel mildly irritated by that video.

So because of that I decided to submit this poll question to see what the people of Tumblr have to say about that point of view.

So yeah - I’m not a person questioning whether or not I should dislike a person based on what parts of food they choose to NOT eat, but instead someone who wanted to see if other people are irritated by people who judge others for not eating certain parts of food as well.

(Also, I meant to ask whether or not it is immature for someone to dislike the act of NOT eating certain parts of food instead, of disliking the person themselves for doing that.

I’m so sorry that I worded that question wrong and anything else within this ask and/or confession.

Feel free to vote on the poll based on what the poll question states instead of what I meant to say within it).

Thank you for reading this confession and happy Disability Pride Month! 💖

Thank you for the clarification

#not a poll

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vvatchword · 2 years ago

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In Defense of BioShock Infinite

Although I had preordered BioShock Infinite with all its bells and whistles, I did not actually play it until January 2023. And lordy, I had me another Experience with a capital E. How the hell a bunch of urban Yanks could capture my experience as a queer democratic-socialist atheist struggling with her roots as a rural evangelical-cum-fascist is kinda magical, honestly. As to the game itself, it didn’t hurt how good it looked—the kickass skyhook gun battles—that novel setting—the complex characters—that delicious historical setting—that bloodthirsty critique of America—and to top it all off, they had pulled yet another Cassandra. Hell, speaking of which—not only was the game fun, it was fucking smart. It was intelligent, memorable, and meaningful in a way I hadn’t experienced in video games for years.

Now, back in 2013, when I had realized that I would be spoiled for Infinite, I left the BioShock fandom. After completing the game, I headed to Tumblr to re-engage, wagging my whole body like an excitable golden retriever, only to discover that BioShock Infinite was remarkably absent, and when mentioned, brutally derided.

“I hate BioShock Infinite and all my friends do, too,” someone said in the tags under a post.

I was utterly befuddled and deeply sad. I wanted to talk about BioShock Infinite! I wanted to dig into it, uncover unexpected ideas, learn new things, talk shit, make new friends—the full fandom experience. And instead I kept stumbling into hateful diatribes and super-charged disgust.

Obviously, I first looked at myself and my own judgment. Had I missed some obvious problem or misread some theme or dialogue? This wouldn’t be the first time I’d snapped down on a hook. But the more I thought about it, the angrier I got.

There are two parts of BioShock Infinite that are unquestionably terrible: the fridging of Daisy Fitzroy and the false equivalence of violence between haves and have-nots (lol what are the have-nots supposed to do, ask nicely?). Additionally, one could look at the use of real Native American tragedies as tasteless. Personally, I do not—in the same way that I don’t find it tasteless that real war victims were used as inspiration for Splicer deformities. This is what really happened; this is commentary on events that really happened to real people.

At this point, I’m sure I don’t have to explain why two of these themes are Unequivocally Bad.

Anyway, I thought that perhaps these were the reasons BSI had been condemned to Super Hell.

I was wrong.

How Criitcsim Werk

This wasn’t the fandom I’d made friends in over 2010. Hell, this wasn’t the fandom of 2013. This was a fandom made up of Babies. They were making their first coltish stumblings into media criticism and with it, dredging up the same brain-dead bullshit from Tumblr circa 2008.

Suddenly I was brought face to face with people who seemed to think that if a character couldn’t be likable or good that the story itself couldn’t be likable or good; that one bad element means the story is unsalvageable (lol u pussies); the implication that one is bad for liking it; the destructive juvenile insistence that media accurately measures its fans’ moral qualities en masse like an astrological sign. This goes far beyond simple like or dislike and plunges head-first into Puritanism: praying loudly on street-corners instead of quietly in a dark corner where God might hear you.

At one point I had a kid go off about how they wouldn’t take time to understand Booker DeWitt’s perspective because he had (fictionally) taken part in a genocide. (That same person said the Native American element had been employed for shock value, a thought that sometimes keeps me up at night, because it is legitimately one of the dumbest criticisms the game has ever received.) At another point I saw someone acting personally offended that (fictional person) Dr. Suchong’s (fictional) data was being stolen (in a fiction) by a (fictional) racist who would (fictionally) take credit for (fictional person) Suchong’s (fictional) inventions “while calling him slurs”. Sure, a better question would have been, “Why would the creative team opt to do this” rather than assume intentional racism from a Jewish creative director with an in-office multi-ethnic team in the year of our lord 2013, but why not handwave the choice with prurient moral dismay so your audience won’t beat you to death with bats?

It was as though fans were treating these completely fictional characters as real people whose personal gods had opted to torment them, and that their tormentors merited the kind of censure that psychopaths should receive. As I hope all of you understand, this is fucking madness.

More than once I saw people posting about hating the studio or the creative director in ways that seemed intense, unreasoning, and excessive—notably an “I Hate [Irrational Games creative director] Ken Levine” stamp (rofl the more things change amirite). People get so performatively moralistic about it that I started wondering if I missed something big along the way. Was there some secret Voxophone I missed swearing fealty to baby Hitler or some shit?

Double Standards

At the same time, I was utterly confused. BioShocks 1 and 2 both featured some absolutely ghastly bullshit based on real-life horrors and a thick mix of complicated human beings—many of them victims who have become monsters. The fact they are grounded in historical tragedies is a huge part of their appeal. Hell, I don’t think those games would have had half their meaning without World Wars I and II and the threat of a third.

A gay man who feels so cursed by his orientation that he is incapable of intimacy and systematically destroys his ex-lovers—including the man he loves the most. A Korean who survived Japanese occupation and a Jewish Holocaust survivor repeat the violence and traumas exacted upon them and their people, subjecting a new generation to agonies unthinkable. Chasing the shadows of Bolsheviks, a Russian citizen becomes the brutal tyrant that he loathed. A rich lawyer with an easygoing drawl designs a concentration camp and systematically harvests hundreds, if not thousands of political prisoners, selling them out to medical testing for a quick buck.

But a Native man who destroys his own people and class to ensure his own survival and social acceptability is too far? This character is where people drew the line, so much so that the entire game is disavowed? Hell, if you’re just talking about Booker (rather than Comstock), he doesn’t have anywhere near the largest bodycount. If we were to judge on the metric of human misery alone, Booker wouldn’t even hit the top ten.

Keep in mind that the most-discussed BioShock game on Tumblr is BioShock 2, and that one of the biggest fandom favorites is Augustus Sinclair—the easy-talkin’ Georgia lawyer who sells your character into horrors past all human comprehension, as he sold hundreds before and after you. Sinclair is a motherfucker so vile that BioShock 2 gives you no choice but to murder him. But Sinclair is also pleasant; good-looking to some; spends the whole game making sweet love to your ear; is one of the only true positive experiences you experience in a horror story. Unlike DeWitt, a man who is brutal and awful from step one, Sinclair is smooth and sweet. Unlike DeWitt, Sinclair’s victims are faceless, completely fictional, and carry no political or social baggage.

People fuckin’ ship this guy with Subject Delta, his explicit victim. He’s usually described as a squishy cinnamon roll. In most fanfiction, he often gets to escape to the surface and fuck Delta while helping raise Eleanor as Dad 2. It is rare that I find fanfiction that acknowledges his monsterhood in all its glory. In fact, I can only think of two.

Literacy Comes in Levels

My problem with the over-the-top hatred of BioShock Infinite is along the same lines as my confusion at Twilight and Harry Potter hate: there is so much worse out there (how much do the haters actually engage with media if they think this is that bad—yes, even considering the shitty creators themselves!), the hatred far outweighs the sin committed (in BioShock’s case, the truly bad bits are not central enough to derail the larger narrative), people don’t seem to hate it so much as they want to be seen hating it, fans want to enforce an unspoken rule hating it (bitches this is poison. Stop this), and there’s something about the hate that stinks of poor reading comprehension.

A great metric for general literacy is the newspaper. In journalism, you’re writing for the lowest-common denominator, which for years here in the USA has been about a fifth-grade reading level (about 10-11 years old, for my non-American readers). The AP posted an article a couple years back about how the general reading comprehension of Americans needs to be dropped to a third-grade one (8-9 years), and baby, I’m here to say it’s true.

Most of the problem is that the American education system is shitty as fuck. The rest of it is from an extremely American disdain of intellectualism and the arts. People are not taught how to interpret art or literature—a difficult and subtle skill which involves accepting such truths as “multiple contradictory readings can exist and yet be simultaneously correct”, “the author can be a complete tool and still be right about things”, “the author can be a great person and still write horrifyingly incorrect bullshit”, and “worthwhile works can be ridiculously long and it really is your fault for not having an attention span”.

Media criticism must be learned through trial, error, asking questions, confidently swaggering into a public space to announce your brilliant insight only to have your ass handed to you (usually by your older self ten years later), being willing to admit you swaggered confidently into a public space to state bullshit and then amending your bullshit only to produce more bullshit, and otherwise making a complete and utter cock of yourself. We are taught to fear and flee pain and failure, despite the fact this is how we learn and improve. Because we judge our value by whether or not we are “smart,” we are afraid of displaying that we don’t know something or might be mistaken–better not to try at all than to reveal ourselves to be fools. And yet the best way to learn is to crash up against someone else and be proven wrong!

American parents are terrified of hurting their children to the point that they spare them cognitive dissonance of any kind, disavowing difficult art—without any appreciation for the fact that art is how we provide safe spaces to explore key human experiences, better preparing us to face those difficult subjects when there are real-world consequences (sex, gender and social expression, grief, violence, predation, illness, interacting with people of different ideologies, whatever new issue is pissing off some smooth-brained old motherfucker somewhere).

If parents and teachers aren’t teaching us how to interpret art, we’re probably never going to develop the skill at all, or crash unsubtly into it in a piecemeal fashion (hello it me). Another unfortunate side effect is that these readers tend to be blitheringly superficial: they are literally intellectually incapable of reading deeper than the uppermost layer of a text. The curtains are always blue.

And let’s not forget the role moral performatism plays in media criticism, which although faaar from new, has reached hilarious levels in the age of social media. What’s important isn’t understanding something, it’s finding something to symbolically burn at the stake so everyone knows God loves us: please keep loving me, please don’t hurt me, please don’t throw me on the fire—for performatism is not for outsiders. We long for human connection so fucking much that it’s more important to destroy what might point out our fallibilities than it is to let ourselves stand in the furnace and burn out the dross.

What do you think the point of BioShock Infinite was?

Emotional Machines

Let’s face it. Human beings give a lot more credence to how something makes them feel than they do its complex invisible reality. We are not logical creatures; we are emotional ones. Our logic is too new a biological mechanism to override something as powerfully stupid as our primal lizard brains.

Knowing this, let’s take BioShock’s most popular characters. The first two are Subject Delta and Jack Wynand, the protagonists of BioShocks 2 and 1, respectively; and why not? They’re the characters we play. In the first two BioShocks, whether or not you kill Little Sisters determines the ending you receive. In other words, Delta and Jack can only be as “wicked” as the players are.

How do people want to see themselves? As good. What do people want to see around themselves? Good. (What is “good”? Uh, well,,,,,,) What do they want? Simple moral questions with simple moral answers. And in the first two BioShocks, what is moral is obvious: don’t kill little girls. It’s actually kind of insulting once you say it out loud.

In-fandom, Jack and Subject Delta are almost never painted as murderers or monsters, but as victims and heroes; I saw someone musing about putting Subject Delta on a “gentle giants” poll and I nearly choked on my own tongue. I only saw that musing because someone put Subject Delta and Jack in a “Best Fathers” poll. Nobody in-fandom really considers the “evil” or “complicated” endings as canon choices, despite those versions being fully understandable alternate readings, with a story that doesn’t make sense without them. (I don’t believe Burial at Sea is necessarily canon; in fact, I would bet good money that it is a huge middle finger lol, mostly because a number of brain-dead motherfuckers won’t take unhappiness for an answer.)

Most fandom art and writing is gentle, sweet, good: the symbolic healing of the damaged, the salvation of innocents, the turning of new leaves. These things are not just saccharine sweet—they tend to be unrealistically sweet. Now, far be it from me to demand these works cease. There’s a reason they exist. People write them because they need hope and happiness; I have enjoyed them greatly myself and intend to enjoy them in the future. But if y’all get to have your dessert, I demand the right to have my dinner.

The Colours Out of Earth

Let there be media where the opposite can also be true: where everything is unbelievably complicated and unforgivably fucked-up. Let there be characters who slide slurs into their speech without thinking. Let there be characters who destroy themselves in a thousand different ways, not all of them obvious, some of them horrifying. Let there be well-meaning people struggling with all their mights to do what is right only to destroy everyone around them and then completely miss the fact it’s all their faults. Let there be wickedness painted as goodness, superficial appearances accepted over essential and inherent values, denial of change and transformation, failure to accept that what is old must die and what is new must live, human stupidity and short-sightedness and cruelty in all their flavors. Let’s smash it all together and see how it plays out.

Oh, badly? No shit! But “badly” isn’t the point. How does it play out?

Let there be a world of gradients—a place I can float from color to color, hue to hue, value to value, while attempting to figure out where, why, how, and by whom they transform—to taste concepts in a hundred different ways, test their textures by a hundred different mediums, insert them into a hundred different contexts. I need to understand why I feel the way I do; I need to understand morality in all its hideous, fragmentary glory. For I have been sold to a ideology of blacks and whites, and let me tell you: it prepares you for nothing, and it will always destroy what is most precious about human life.

I can no longer believe in a world where what is lost always returns, because that world does not exist. I have a reflexive need to come to terms with Finality: what I have lost, what I have destroyed, what will never return, what will never be better. I have a reflexive need to understand Transformation: what I am now, what is as of the present, what has risen shambling from the ashes, what turns to gaze upon me in the darkness. I need to understand what is wretched about me as much as I need to heal myself. How can I heal if I can’t understand how I have hurt and been hurt?

I need to shine a light in the dark. Not to remodel it, not to destroy it—because I also can’t believe in a world where the wicked is destroyed forever—but to behold it, to learn from it, to view my own impact upon it, to accept how it has become a part of me, to learn how to do my best (because that’s all one can do). I must learn to love people more than causes, I must learn to love people rather than the act of winning, I must learn to love people rather than battle. I need to stand in that endless black with the lamp off and my eyes closed, letting the agony roll over me, burning with a fire that throws no light, rolling back and forth from an intense self-loathing to a fury at a society that destroys what is most valuable because it didn’t make them feel the way they wanted.

The Unforgivable

I believe that there are only two differences between Booker DeWitt and his equally cursed cohorts.

In the Hall of Whores: The Unmarked Slate

First, unlike the previous two games, where you enter the world as a tabula rasa and might roleplay as what you perceive as a good person, you are explicitly put into the shoes of a monster, and nothing you do can save you.

With other shitty BioShock characters, you are passively watching other people, and you are able to hold yourself apart. Sure, everyone else is crazy as fuck from using biological Kryptonite, but you’re too smart to end up a crazy fucking asshole like them! Sure, you are now technically a mass murderer, but those fuckers deserved it, damn it!

“Look at this crazy bastard!” you say, rolling your eyes at the Steinmans and Cohens and Ryans and Fontaines. “It sure is a great thing I’m not a crazy bastard!”

You are able to escape acknowledging that you, too, in certain circumstances, might be the crazy bastard. You are being challenged to stand in the body of a person who has committed unforgivable sins. Imagine if you yourself committed those sins. Imagine what sins you have already committed. Imagine what brutalities you cannot take back. Imagine what horrors you have wreaked just by breathing.

“Ahhhh!” said players, probably. “What do you mean I’m not allowed to be good?”

Because that’s what the game was designed to do. Because “good” is a fucking cop-out and if it’s how you live with yourself wait until you find out you’ve been doing horrifying bullshit all your life without question. You can be evil by association through no fault of your own.

Original Sin

Second, the plight of Native Americans is a sin that non-Natives will always carry, and the socially conscious are aware of this even if they don’t know how to put it into words. The state of affairs being what it is, it is unlikely that First Peoples will ever be treated humanely, much less have their land returned. They must struggle for scraps of what is rightfully theirs while we lounge on their corpses. We cannot help but benefit from their destruction; we are made unwitting partners with our forebears; we steal the fruits of their lands and make mockeries of their faiths and identities. We have destroyed part of what made this world fascinating and unique and most of it can never be returned. Even if everything were to be made right tomorrow, their genocide is a sin that we will carry until we die, because the only reason we could be here at all is because they were killed.

The obvious solution stands before us, but the powers that be are so much greater than we that we are effectively powerless, and achieving anything less than total restoration smacks of anticlimax.

This is unbearable.

How can one think of oneself as a good person if one sees the good that must be done, but cannot achieve it? If one’s actions are meaningless? Goodness without action is pretension.

We are all Booker DeWitt. We have all set fire to the tipi. We swept the ashes away, we ignored the sizes of the bones, we built a CVS on their graves, and then we made statues and holidays commemorating Native Americans like the world’s cheapest “Thinking of You” card. We have de-fanged them, transformed them into cardboard cutouts, and set them up as cute little side characters in our sweeping American dream.

Booker is not a man. Booker is America and Americans—and America and Americans are monstrous: one part hypocrisy, two parts incessant violence, three parts constant peacocking, and four parts dumb as a stump.

The Monsters We Make

Outside of the message about “choice,” an enormous part of BioShock’s thematic ensemble is the creation of monsters. How are monsters created? Who or what is responsible for creating them? What do the monsters think made them the ways they are? Can a monster be saved? How? Is it enough to acknowledge you did wrong and want to be a better person?

Maybe most people are aware on some instinctive level of what facing one’s own monsterhood means. No one wants it. It’s not fun. It hurts. It’s embarrassing. It’s destructive. It’s admitting you don’t have it all together and might never, ever—that despite your best actions, you can have it horribly wrong at any point. In an age where we demand moral perfection, it demands vulnerability: you must admit that sometimes you’re the racist, the transphobe, the sexist, the nationalist, the classist, the homophobe, the violent, the wrong, the dumbfuck.

Human beings are not built to be moral; human beings are built to survive. We so rapidly learn how to deal with our contexts at such young ages that we don’t have the time or capabilities to question why those contexts are the ways they are or why it is demanded we perform the ways we do.

In a very real way, BioShock Infinite demands vulnerability of us. It demands you look in the mirror and see what is monstrous in you—how you have been created—manufactured—a tool, a machine, a trained animal. It asks you to recognize that you can be a monster simply by association. And if we can’t look into the mirror and truly acknowledge that monsterhood, we run very real risks of becoming or enabling those monsters in one way or another.

Worst of all: perhaps monsterhood isn’t optional. Perhaps the monster was inside of us from the very beginning. It’s not a matter of if you become a monster, but when, under what circumstances, by whose hand. What is more, believing the “right” moral stances will not save you. Monsterhood can afflict anyone, in any ideology, any political stance, in any social movement, in any faith. The only element that can save you is to truly love other people, and even then, you can fail, for there can be states where there is no winner and ways to misread how best to treat another person.

Environment and Society: Context Will Not Be Denied

BioShock 1’s original ending is Jack-as-monster, regardless of how many children he saves, regardless of your feelings as player. He passes through the gauntlet of Rapture, but he has supped of its poison. And he wasn’t poisoned when he entered Rapture the second time—he was poisoned the minute he was conceived. He was born of it. He had no hope of ever escaping it—he never could have—he’d never had a choice to begin with.

No matter what choices you make in BioShock Infinite, Elizabeth will always kill you. Why? Because she has seen every world—every context—every limitation—every boon. And there is no way to stop what has been; there is no way to undo what has been done. The minute you have committed to a decision, you have split the universe; there is no telling what kind of person it will make you. In fact, there’s no telling which of your decisions will matter at all. Only Elizabeth can see because she is the unlimited future: your offspring stands before you, judge and jury, and you will have no choice but to accept her verdict, for despite your name, you are incapable of controlling how you are interpreted.

Elizabeth sits across from you in the boat and stares without blinking. She sees a million million similar Bookers. Some are a little bit taller, some a little bit shorter, some a little heavier or lighter. Some more-resemble one grandparent or another. They have different colored ties. This one blinks when rain hits him in the eyeball. That one took a brutal beating back on the airship and one eye is swollen shut. That one can’t stop shaking; this one is unable to speak at all; one hasn’t yet lost hope, although even he doesn’t realize it.

They all lowered the torch to the tipi.

The baptism determined Comstock; what determined Booker?

Why Booker Is

In BioShock 1, characters are often stand-ins for larger concepts. Thus Ryan stands in as Ayn Rand’s Objectivist Ubermensch; Bill McDonagh as Andrew Ryan’s conscience; Diane McClintock as the citizenry of Rapture; Captain Sullivan as law and order; Frank Fontaine as the truest expression of Objectivism in its distilled form.

Who is Booker? Most importantly: why is he?

Booker is a fictional character with a brutal background based on historical events, alternative and true. Booker might be Lakota; Booker might have undergone forced Anglicization; Booker might have been ripped from his parents; Booker is a product of violence, perhaps literally. Booker is American exceptionalism distilled. Booker is the past in constant judgment of itself, unable to live with itself and unable to die. Booker destroys what is best in him and around him in exchange for belonging. Booker has sold the future to absolve his sins. Booker has sold his daughter because he is a fictional character in a work of fiction who needs to be propelled.

Booker is a shell, a sluice, an environment. Booker is the broken shape you are meant to fill, horrified. His internal shape should torture you as it has tortured him: the messy slaggy soul of a shitty tin soldier.

Does Booker take the baptism and become Comstock? If so, it might be his second one. His last name literally means “the white.” His first name can mean “author.” It is most likely his second name: an attempt to rewrite himself. And when he was unable to rewrite himself the first time, when the cognitive dissonance boiled at the edges of his skull, he found there was only one way to cleanse himself the second: to remake the world entirely. To force transformation on everyone else. To take vengeance on a world that could never love him, never want him—to create a world that has no choice but to love him. If he can’t change the world’s mind, he’ll change the world.

Note what he opts to do: to take the fight to the environment–to the unyielding universe.

Context Is Everything

It is no mistake that BioShock Infinite occurs in 1912: the sinking of the Titanic is often credited with ending an unfettered optimism, a period when the Western world believed technology had brought the human race into a golden age. With World War I—which would follow a mere two years later—came modern warfare and all the horrors thereof, not the least of which was the realization that humans had created a kind of war that could destroy the entire world. World War I also seeded the rise of the United States: much of the wealth of warring Europe—itself fat on the blood of subjugated peoples and stolen lands—would rattle into America’s coffers.

It is also no mistake that BioShock 1 directly follows World War II. With WWII came a heightened terror—that this war is not the last war, that there will never be an end to war, that war will go on expanding and expanding until it has consumed us all. World War III would not be denied: prettily packaged in the ideals of its children, it simply followed the utopians down to their underwater tombs. According to BioShock 1’s original ending, World War III is not a matter of if—it’s a matter of when.

But even more important than the history in the BioShock games are their settings. Mute leviathans, Rapture and Columbia determine all of your behaviors: from where you can exist in space to all of your desires and goals to how you choose to present yourself to how you opt to behave. Isolated in extremism—whether that extremism is the crushing depths of the ocean or the unbearable lightness of the air—most of their power is that they simply cannot be escaped. You can’t outrun them. They are everywhere. They are everything.

Like Lovecraft before it, BioShock acknowledges the greatest horror of all: you cannot escape your context. Your context does not only involve your immediate surroundings. It is also historical; contains zeitgeists from various cultures and subcultures; is filled with pressures both personal and impersonal, human and nonhuman. Many of these forces can hurt you. Many more can destroy you. What you do to survive depends very much on where, when, and with whom you must live.

Human beings are not built to be moral.

The Death of the Future

In the film Operation, Burma!, a soldier asks Errol Flynn: “Who were you before the war?”

“An architect,” says Flynn.

Who were you? Because that “you” doesn’t matter now. That “you” is irrelevant. So you’re an architect. What the war does to you; what these deaths mean to you; your past, your education, your loves and desires and forward motivation, the you that could have been outside war, the you that slogs alone into the brutal future—all completely irrelevant. Your forebears don’t care so long as you can bleed.

Children are the manufactured tools of their creators—helpless before the enormous strength of their elders and the zeitgeists that enclose them, poisoned by their parents’ insecurities and flaws, utilized like weapons regardless of the cost—often with great love.

Consider something more than the traumatized culture: consider the society filled with traumatized children; consider the traumatized society. Consider channeling children through that trauma over and over and over again, if you can. Poisoned—poisoned—poisoned—all of us poisoned. Poisoned by those who loved us most. Poisoned by the people we trusted. Poisoned by the people who meant to make a better world.

I believe it is notable that creative director Ken Levine is Jewish; I have read from multiple accounts that the European Jewish diaspora was uniquely traumatized from the Holocaust and passed that trauma down upon their own families. I sometimes wonder if he saw that firsthand.

The fathers eat sour grapes; their children’s teeth are set on edge.

Choice: Player Expectations and Entitlement

For players who experienced BioShocks 1 and 2 with their multiple endings (Good, Bad, and “ok bye then I guess” respectively), it must have been jarring to suddenly reckon with being a monster. How often I see players grousing that nothing they do will change their wicked pasts! These players completely miss that the only meaningful choice had already been made, that it had nothing to do with the player at all, and even if they had been there, DeWitt was still unforgivable. The only way to go on was to bow out and allow the future to redefine herself.

Nobody was ready for that shit.

Like it or not, BioShock 1 had set a precedent. Not everyone’s going to read up on creator intentions. If any keyword came blaring through the noise, it would have been “choice.” Most players only recognize choice by the ability to make it, not the absence of it, and most of them weren’t equipped to recognize that its lack was the point. The meaningless choices were commentary, and they were as much about the player as they were about DeWitt himself. Not every choice will be meaningful, will it? And there will be choices you make that will be momentous, but they will seem very small when you make them.

Because most players had experienced what they thought was a basic moralistic tale in the first two games, and would see Infinite not as reflection upon America’s destructive personality, its obsession with a meaningless Good/Bad duocracy, and the infinite, cyclical nature of violence, they saw Booker’s death as corrupted artsy claptrap.

“I did the good schuut,” they say. “I want the good schuut end. Where happy end??? Where treat :(”

Bitch the future is here.

Time to die.

It’s Not Me, It’s You

Generally I despise essays that end with, “But the real fault lay with the clueless motherfuckers who played the game!” Often, if enough people complain, there’s something to it; the message has been obscured somehow. Details or explanations weren’t clear or intuitive enough, some mechanism isn’t working somewhere, some character needs to talk more or less, some setting needs to be transformed. O artist: stop whining and get cracking. If everywhere you go smells like shit, it’s time to look under your shoe.

But sometimes it’s true that a piece of media is on a level folks aren’t equipped for. Think of every literature and art class you’ve ever had, if you’ve been fortunate enough to have one. There’s always someone scoffing in a back row, like here are all these jokers making more of something than they should. Similarly, some of you have been arguing with me this entire time, saying: “I just wanted a video game. I just wanted to shoot something and feel better and instead I get this bullshit ending that makes no sense.”

First of all, smart bullshit (and even fucked-up attempts at smart bullshit! Hi BioShock 2) gets to exist on this Earth along with Gmod and Roblox or Schuut Big Tits 84 (there are 84 tits and you must shoot them all. They explode into smaller tits) or whatever-the-fuck-else you think is a worthwhile gaming experience. Second of all, miserable bullshit also gets to exist, and what did you fucking expect if you played through either BioShocks 1 or 2? When you hear a football player quavering out in the darkness for his mom to pick him up, how’d that make you feel? What did you think was going to happen to Jack after pounding back the entire Plasmid library, the cancer cocktail that explicitly destroys the fuck out of its users? Third of all, if you missed the smart bullshit going on in BioShock 1 and didn’t think BioShock Infinite might be larger in scope in more ways than one, that’s on you. Fourthly, if you were simply satisfied with saving like, 15 kids from a violently-perishing city of thousands and call it good, I mean… is that really where your thoughts end? Are you really that fucking small?

It’s Not You, It’s Me

You ever meet those motherfuckers who talk shit about Shakespeare or modern art? And you’re just left there staring with dead eyes at this poseur who mistakes playing devil’s advocate for intelligence, cheek resting on your fist, thinking about the fanfic you’re writing, wondering who it’s for, remembering that all your smut-writing friends get ten times the viewers, and considering throwing yourself in front of a bus.

Yeah, there’s a personal element to this: the fact that BioShock Infinite is the kind of art I like and long for and want to make myself, the fact that the game was successful and yet the studio was closed, the way its DLC was so rushed that the story plopped out like half-baked mystery meat—realizing that the same forced rush was at 2K’s behest for BioShock 2, as well, and wondering how good art can ever be made in this unforgiving capitalist hellscape. The game was weirdly niche and I’m not 100% sure I’ll ever experience anything quite like it again. And with the whiners in this fandom, the loud ones controlling the narrative, some fresh brain-dead exec in some brain-dead publisher might be like: “We must keep it safer and simpler for these fuckin babby adult!”

Nah bitch nah. Naaaah. Cry some more while I enjoy me my fucking dinner. I’ll eat it while making loud smacking noises and keeping unbroken eye contact. Come here. Let’s look at each other. It’ll be like Lady and the Tramp but we want to punch each other. What truer form of love can there be here in the modern world?

I keep having to remind myself that this response isn’t new. I keep having to remind myself of my place. I keep having to remind myself why I write, why I read, why I like to experience art to begin with. It’s not for the reasons other people do it. Oh, I want the same emotional release as everyone else, I want the same rollicking plots, I adore the same tropes. I seek out everything and anything for a good time; I’ll read Moby Dick today and a smutty 5,000-word abortion with the world’s most suspect grammar tomorrow. I don’t give a shit if it’s low- or high-brow; there are all kinds of ways to have fun and there are all kinds of ways to engage with art, and lord knows I’ve done my share of smooth-brain criticism. The problem is that I’ve always wandered off by myself, sunk into an all-consuming reverie, on tracks that no one else ever seems to be on, and then looked up to talk excitedly about something only to realize I’m alone. And whose fault is that?

By the same token, maybe I haven’t talked enough. Maybe I spend too much time with my mouth shut. Maybe I haven’t stood up enough for things that are worth our time, worth talking up, worth setting on pedestals.

I tell you, BioShock Infinite will stand the test of time. It’s too good for this. It’s too good for you, warts and all. Some of you will grow to understand that; some of you won’t; many of you will shrug and go on with your lives (and this is fine; it is only a video game). But I’ve truly not seen anything like it. I can’t believe a mainstream video game was allowed to be so fucking brutal about the American juggernaut, and what’s more, that it sold like hotcakes. Plus, I can’t think of any works in recent memory that have struck me so close to my own heart. No creative work has made me start beating a monster’s face into a washbasin for ten hours only to lift her by the scalp and see my own eyes looking back.

Look into those eyes. See your own stupid impulses pouring out. Your own stupid excuses, your violences, your sins—your claws, your teeth, your costumes, your hilarious attempts at interpretive dance. The beast doth protest too much.

O, monster—behold thyself—and tremble.

#bioshock #bioshock 2 #bioshock infinite #bioshock infinite burial at sea #booker dewitt #subject delta #jack wynand #augustus sinclair #essays #video games #spoilers #vvatchword #vvbsreceipts

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inspired-by-the-music · 1 year ago

Text

smile: rewritten

pairing: jaemin x reader featuring: jisung as the reader's brother; the other members of nct dream synopsis: before even meeting him, y/n decides that she hates her brother's friend. nobody yells at jisung and gets away with it! as she grows distant from her buzzkill boyfriend, y/n comes to realize that jaemin can't be that bad. nobody who makes people smile like does can be that bad. warning: reader's boyfriend is an awful jerk note: this is a rewrite of a fic that is about three years old. available on: tumblr, wattpad taglist: @niinjo

“I’m so proud of you, Jisung!” You cooed when you learned that your baby brother earned his first part-time job.

Jisung mumbled, “Ah, cut it out.” He couldn’t fight his smile as he squirmed to escape your efforts to pinch his rosy cheeks. “I don’t act like this when you make the honor roll at your college!”

“That’s because my academic excellence has become expected, almost unimpressive,” you joked confidently. You almost choked on laughter when Jisung groaned at your mock arrogance. “But you—” you poked his arm— “you’ve always been a precious baby, so it’s weird to watch you step into the adult world.”

Long ago, Jisung accepted that he would always be a baby in your eyes. He didn’t waste his breath arguing that he was kind of, basically, technically an adult. He blinked at you and rested his head against the couch. “I don’t think about it like that. It’s just a job at the cafe, and I’m only doing it because my friends are.”

Spending time with Jisung was refreshing because his simple, youthful outlook challenged your habit of overanalyzing. That aspect of your relationship hadn’t changed since you enrolled in the local university. Jisung was still very much your baby brother. Yet, as he laid back and stretched his legs over your lap and his socked feet dangled off the arm of the couch, you realized that he was growing up. He was growing up, and he didn’t think anything about it. Meanwhile, you mourned every second of lost youth. To Jisung, the next steps in life were an exciting adventure with his friends.

What would it be like, you wondered enviously, to be like Jisung?

You wouldn’t ask. Even if you did, Jisung wouldn’t have known how to answer.

He playfully wiggled his toes into your ribs, and you laughed while swatting at his legs. A voice sounded through his headset. The words were unintelligible, but the tone was unmistakably annoyed. They prompted Jisung to sit upright, plant his feet on the carpeted floor, and unpause his video game. Although his gaze was fixed on the flashing screen, he covered only one ear with the headset.

He heard you ask, “Who is that?”

“Jaemin,” Jisung whispered out of the side of his mouth and covered the microphone so his friend wouldn’t hear.

Because he was playing with just one hand, Jisung caused his team to lose. The loss was evident from the crimson text— “YOU LOSE”— filling the black screen, the slackjawed frown on Jisung’s face, and especially from the shrieks breaking through the headset.

Jisung chanted, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” but the shrieks rang on.

Your face flushed. “Still Jaemin?”

Jisung’s answer with a nod. He didn’t bother to push away the bangs that had fallen into his eyes.

“What is he even saying?” You hissed.

“Nothing really,” Jisung shrugged away from your question.

You were overprotective of Jisung; you wouldn’t deny that. His willingness to defend his buddy despite his flaring temper fuelled your frustration. Maybe, you thought later, you shouldn’t have disliked that Jaemin kid without having met him.

Rolling your eyes, you demanded, “Tell him that it’s just a game. You can play again until you win.”

Jisung shook his head and calmly explained, “That’s the worst thing to say to a raging gamer, Y/N—”

“Are you talking to a girl?” Jaemin roared. “Is that why we lost the tournament? Because you’re flirting with a girl?”

Sensing that you were reaching to snatch the headset to rival Jaemin’s temper, Jisung stood tall on the couch so you couldn’t reach his head no matter how hard you stretched. He huffed at Jaemin, “I’m talking to my sister, not flirting, and I have to go!” He disconnected the headset and turned the game off before you could say anything to threaten his friendship with Jaemin.

You slumped down on the cushion. “You must have made some really nice friends while I’ve been busy busting my butt at school.”

Jisung swore, “He is nice!” He stepped off the couch. Frowning as you rolled your eyes again, he grumbled, “There’s no point in talking when people are too angry to listen.” He sulked to his bedroom, embarrassed by his scoldings.

As he walked away, you resolved to comfort him later after tensions died down.

. . .

Because you were determined to be a kind person, you surrounded yourself with people who didn’t boil your blood. So, to tolerate Jaemin, which was as close as you could get to liking him the way Jisung wanted, you had to maintain a safe distance. For the sake of peace, Jaemin had to remain a faceless name spoken into Jisung’s headset. You tried not to roll your eyes whenever you heard his name.

Despite what anyone says, you didn’t walk into the cafe that night with the intention of meeting Jaemin. In fact, had you known that he was the friend Jisung followed into the workforce, you wouldn’t have agreed to pick your brother up after his shift. That was childish. Since you were already in town after your last class, it only made sense that you should be the one to wait for him in the parking lot.

You were patient at first. Then, minutes passed, and you had to turn the car off to save gas. The almost-summer heat baked the car until you lost all self-control. Had you rushed into the air-conditioned cafe sooner, you might have missed Jaemin’slecture. Your temper wouldn’t have been pushed past its boiling point.

The clock hanging on the cafe wall warned that you had wasted an hour waiting on Jisung. He was still scrubbing tables.

You couldn’t have recognized Jaemin by his neatly combed hair or sparkling smile. You knew him by the frustrated tone he used to scold Jisung. Without looking up from the register, he complained, “You made too many stupid mistakes today, Jisung! I can forgive you for forgetting the day’s special once or twice. But you can’t forget every time you talk to a customer! If you can’t be bothered to memorize something so simple—”

“Ahem.” The boys gawked at you with wide eyes when you cleared your throat.

“— you can always just look at this chalkboard,” Jaemin concluded softly pointing at an overheard sign that boasted: ‘Today’s Special: Green Tea Latte.’

Jaemin’s bug-eyed stare provoked you to quip, “Is that all you do—for fun and for work? Yell at Jisung?”

“Huh?” Jaemin’s jaw dropped in an innocent schoolboy expression that might have been adorable if he hadn’t already landed on your bad side.

This was your biggest fault: you put too much weight into first impressions. You were quick to make up your mind about people; you were slow to reconsider. Of course, you could apologize after realizing that you had misjudged somebody. You even had a consistent record of forgiving inexcusable offenses against yourself. What you couldn’t forgive or forget were attacks against Jisung, and you had just witnessed Jaemin’s second strike.

Jisung resumed wiping the table and acted as the mediator between your wrath and Jaemin’s confusion. He asked you, “What are you doing here?

You didn’t expect Jisung to raise his voice to defend himself from Jaemin’s scolding. He was passive in friendship, and he was subordinate to Jaemin in the workplace hierarchy. You were proud of your brother’s temperament. Proud and, in the cafe in the middle of the night, annoyed.

“Mom and Dad asked me to drive you home after your shift,” you answered. “Your shift was supposed to end over an hour ago.”

Jisung’s lips rounded into a tiny ‘o.’ He turned to Jaemin for confirmation of the time.

Jaemin didn’t notice, though. He was quietly studying you with narrowed eyes. “You’re Jisung’s sister?”

“Yeah,” you nodded stiffly. “I’m the reason you lost your little video game tournament.”

Your words were intended as a blunt weapon, but Jaemin laughed. His smile was almost blinding as he swept his hair out of his face with slender coffee-stained fingers. “Oh yeah. Well, don’t sweat that. I forgive ya!”

Before you could explain that you weren’t apologizing, that neither you nor Jisung needed to beg for forgiveness, Jaemin winked. “As long as you go on a date with me!”

You imagined your reaction looked a lot like Jisung’s: hanging jaws and wide-eyed blinking. Objectively, it was flattering that someone as attractive as Jaemin—excluding his temper—would flirt with you even as a mindless pastime. Even if Jaemin hadn’t made two terrible first impressions, even if he wasn’t one of Jisung’s buddies, even if your pride would allow you to give in to his charms, one dreadful fact remained:

“I have a boyfriend.”

On cue, Jisung rolled his eyes. Grinding his teeth, he dropped his gaze on the table.

“Oh.” Jaemin’s shoulders fell, but his smile barely faltered. His smile, you realized, wasn’t an expression of happiness. His lips were almost permanently set in a toothy grin, even if it didn’t quite reach his eyes.

That must be inconvenient, you thought. Does he smile even when he’s sad? Or when he’s angry?

When Jaemin looked up at Jisung, his eyes crinkled fondly. All traces of past frustration had vanished. “Goodnight, Jisung. I’ll see ya tomorrow!”

Slowing his movements to a near-complete stop, Jisung started, “But I’m not finished—”

Jaemin shot him a pointed look. As quickly as it had calmed, his temper flared. “Don’t keep your sister waiting. I’ll close up.”

As you opened your mouth to thank Jaemin, or apologize for your impatience, or to offer to help clean or at least quietly wait for them to finish, your phone rang. Your mother was calling probably to ask why you and Jisung weren’t home yet.

“Come on,” you urged Jisung gently after silencing your ringer. “We should go. Mom is worried.”

Jisung looked at Jaemin once more for permission. After Jaemin nodded, Jisung untied his apron and folded it on the counter. “Thanks. I’ll see ya tomorrow.”

Had Jisung been less mature, he would have teased you for abandoning your decision to dislike Jaemin after your brief first meeting. Instead, he focused on returning your mother’s call to recount his day. At school, he aced one of his finals. On his first day at work, Jaemin taught him how to make all kinds of coffee and pastries while defending him from fussy customers.

Silence fell over the car after Jisung ended the call. You drummed your thumbs on the steering wheel, anticipating that he must have saved some exciting story for your ears only, just as he always had. But no sound came from the passenger seat.

Your heart sank. You couldn’t blame him for being mad or embarrassed by you. Not only had you treated him like a defenseless infant, as always; you were also rude to his friend.

Yes, you had walked in on Jaemin lecturing Jisung. At least Jaemin had been considerate enough to wait until the cafe was empty to voice his criticisms. All day, while you were too busy at school to do it yourself, Jaemin acted as Jisung’s guardian and protector. And no, you hadn’t forgotten that Jaemin screamed at Jisung and made his face flush because of a stupid video game, but it was clear from watching their interactions and from hearing how proudly Jisung talked about him that they held no grudges. Who were you, then, to hold on to one on Jisung’s behalf?

“I’m sorry,” you muttered. An apologetic glance over at the passenger seat revealed that Jising had fallen fast asleep. His head rested against the window, and his mouth hung agape. Faint snores filled the silence.

As you decided to let him sleep, Jisung jolted awake. His face almost crashed into the dashboard.

“Alright there, partner?” You hummed like you used to in the days when you played Toy Story with him from dusk until dawn.

“Yeah.” Jisung nodded groggily as he settled back and reclined his seat. “Did you say something while I was sleeping, partner?”

Again, you readied your apology, but you hesitated to deliver it. You sensed Jisung’s smile like gentle sun rays illuminating your skin. He wasn’t upset. He didn’t expect an apology. Yet, you felt you owed him one anyway.

He asked, “What’s wrong?”

You shook your head. Although you were sorry, you didn’t have to express that with a long-winded speech he wouldn’t understand. You could express it instead through actions. You could express it through jokes.

“I said Jaemin is a real cutie.” Without glancing away from the road, you winked.

You expected Jisung to gag. Who wants to hear their sister call their friend cute? Surprisingly, he simply warned, “You have a boyfriend, remember?” Unsurprisingly, he choked around the word ‘boyfriend.’

“Why don’t you like him?” You asked. “My boyfriend, I mean?”

Had you looked over, you would have seen Jisung cross his arms and turn his gaze out the window. He asked, “Why do you like him?”

Jisung rarely disliked anyone. His disapproval of your boyfriend made you wary of the romance—if you could even call it a romance. After months of back and forth, he finally decided that you could call him your boyfriend. Because you spent so much time and energy chasing that ideal, the half-formed thought of being with him, you couldn’t let it go.

You should have been able to answer Jisung’s question. It was a dooming sign, your inability to name one reason why you liked your boyfriend. Rather than heeding the sign, however, you clutched the wool over your eyes and turned the radio on.

. . .

“Believe it or not, babe, I’d like to have one date that’s not about babysitting your little brother,” your boyfriend said through a mouthful of rice.

Rejection was an almost daily occurrence, but you reddened nonetheless. “First of all, my brother isn’t that young.” Yes, to you, Jisung was a precious baby, but you had to deny that to defend him from your boyfriend’s criticism. “Second of all, it’s not a date. I told Jisung I would take him and his friends to the arcade if he got good grades on all his exams. I’m inviting you because I thought it would be fun.”

That was a lie. You knew that your boyfriend wouldn’t have fun at the arcade. You invited him because that’s what a good girlfriend would do. Maybe you thought that acting like a better girlfriend would make him act like a better boyfriend. Maybe disappointment was worth the risk because it could be grave enough to sever the delicate relationship.

He had stopped listening, opting instead to scroll through his phone. “Whatever.”

“Yeah,” you mumbled. “Whatever.”

Although you would be an hour early to class, you packed your bag and raced out of the cafeteria. Had you been thinking more clearly—had you been able to breathe comfortably enough to think around him at all—you would have tried again to break up with him. It wasn’t a mystery why Jisung hated him, you admitted as you dashed through the hallway. He treated everything you said like an inconvenience. He was only momentarily satisfied if your attention was solely fixed on them. You couldn’t share your attention with your friends or even your own brother.

Then, he could ignore you for days, leaving you to wonder what you had done to inflict the latest deafening silence. When you would swallow your dwindling pride to approach him, he would reject your advances because they weren’t intimate enough. They weren’t physical enough. They weren’t enough.

You were trapped in a cycle with no clear beginning or end. As you sat with your back pressed against the wall and your knees drawn up to your chest, you couldn’t ignore this fact: you were miserable. Rather than finding the strength to end the relationship, instead of embracing the uncertainty of freedom, you prayed that he would let you go. If he was so uninterested in you, why couldn’t he just walk away?

The answer was obvious. Nobody ever liked him before you did. By clinging to you, even if it meant breaking you, he could build an illusion of self-worth. By putting you down, making you beg for acknowledgment, he could stand over somebody. Because you walked into this situation by pining after somebody who never wanted you, you started to believe that you deserved to be unhappy.

As students flooded out of the classroom and into the hall, you wiped at your eyes with ice-cold hands. You weren’t crying; you were trying to wipe the tired dark circles from your face.

On their way out of a classroom, someone called your name.

It was Jaemin. Beaming, he waved both hands excitedly like he was greeting an old friend—like you hadn’t loathed him before meeting him.

The dread your boyfriend caused and the guilt of initially disliking Jaemin faded when Jaemin sat next to you. He slung his yellow backpack onto the floor. He stretched his arm along the back of the bench. When his fingers brushed against your shoulder, you raised your eyebrows. He said, “I gotta leave room for others!”

“Right.” You nodded dubiously. “What are you doing here, Jaemin?”

“Ouch, icy.” He winced, grinning. “Just give me a chance, and I’ll prove that I’m worthy of sitting with you!”

“I don’t doubt it.” He blushed at your honest attempt at flattery, and you continued, “But that’s not what I meant. Why are you doing here at my school?”

Jaemin shrugged. “It’s not just your school.”

Your eyes widened. “You go to school here?” He nodded. “Really? I could have sworn you went to school with Jisung.”

“Nope.” Jaemin popped the ‘p’ proudly. “I hope you didn’t reject me just because you thought I was too young!” You laughed, and he winked. “It’s okay if you did. I’ll give you another chance to date me.”

You shook your head, almost in a futile attempt to convince yourself that Jaemin’s smile didn’t make your heart flutter.

“Just playing.” He dropped the arm resting behind your shoulders to act as a barrier between your bodies. “Jisung said you really have a boyfriend, so I probably shouldn’t flirt with you.”

You blurted, “He probably wouldn’t mind.” You regretted the words as soon as they left your mouth, but you couldn’t pull them out of the air.

“Who?” Curious, Jaemin tilted his head. “Jisung or your boyfriend?” You didn’t answer, so he tried another question: “Would you mind?”

Eager to escape, you flinched off of the bench. “Sorry, Jaemin. I have to get to class.”

As much as you loathed your boyfriend, as much as you were starting to like Jaemin, outright flirting wasn’t right. You didn’t need to add anything else to your list of things to overanalyze.

You couldn’t control what Jaemin did. He dove to reach your hand. He didn’t seem to care that you had a boyfriend. He probably didn’t have to care. The only heart he was responsible for was his own.

His touch was undeterred by your gasp. Because you didn’t yank your hand from his grasp, Jaemin smiled as he asked, “You’re going to the arcade with us this weekend, right?”

Touching somebody’s hand shouldn’t have been a big deal, but Jaemin’s touch took your breath away. “Oh, are you going too?” Jaemin nodded. He maintained eye contact, and your thoughts were clouded. “I’ll be there. Who do you think is paying for all the tokens and pizza?”

“Huh?” Surprised, Jaemin dropped your hand. You could breathe again. His eyes narrowed. “Not you. I’ll pay.”

You shook your head. “Jisung is my brother, and I promised to take him and his friends—”

“Do you know how many people he invited?” When you shook your head, Jaemin counted on his hand, “Mark, Renjun, Jeno, Haechan, Chenle, and me. Excluding me because I’m not letting you pay my way—and including Jisung, that’s five boys you’re promising to pay for. Five boys—” he wiggled his fingers menacingly—“who live on pizza and games.”

Forcing your arms through the straps of your backpack, you chuckled at his dramatic delivery. You asked, “If they’re so expensive, why are you so determined to pay for them yourself?”

He started, “Because—”

Your alarm sounded to signal that your class would start soon. “I have to go to class, Jaemin, so we’ll have to bicker about this later.”

As you dismissed the alarm, Jaemin yanked your phone away. “Here. I’ll give you my number.” His eyes twinkled when they met yours. A corner of his lips formed a half-smile as he clarified, “Just so we can discuss this payment business. Don’t get any funny ideas.”

. . .

Although you promised Jisung that you wouldn’t waste the night by waiting for you boyfriend, you didn’t keep your word. You sat alone at a table in the food court and stared at the door for about half an hour after Jisung ran into the arcade with his friends. Were you hoping that your boyfriend would show up? Not really. You didn’t want to play skeeball with him or anything. You just wanted, needed, for somebody to break the silence. After you last left him in the cafeteria, he left your texts unanswered. There was no reason to think he had changed his mind about coming to the arcade.

He’s not coming, you told yourself. Again, always, you were caught between relief and anxiety. Your sweaty palms clutched the edges of your seat. I’ll give him ten more minutes. After that, I’m having fun with or without him.

But you knew it was impossible to have fun with him. That truth was more blatant when Jaemin plopped into the chair next to you.

“I gave the children money to buy pizza,” he boasted in a raspy voice to emulate old age, “per our agreement.”

That was the compromise reached via texts: Jaemin would pay for food, and you would pay for arcade access.

Jaemin’s sparkling smile dimmed as he noticed how you nervously eyed the door and your phone. “Are you expecting someone?” You hesitated to respond, and he warned, “The kids will be here any minute. If you tell me what’s bothering you, we can work through it while we still have some privacy.”

His earnest stare prompted you to blurt, “My boyfriend.” Noting Jaemin’s frown, you squirmed through your stresses. “I invited him— who knows why?— and he said that he wanted to have a date without my brother tagging along. So, obviously, I stormed off. And we haven’t talked in two days, which isn’t that long, but I don’t know what to say to fix things. And he isn’t even here, and—”

Jaemin blinked like Jisung always did when your worries bubbled out of your mouth, so you cut yourself off. Jaemin’s mouth fell open, and it stayed open as he struggled to form a response.

“I’m sorry.” You said while shrinking in your seat. “I shouldn’t have told you that.”

Aside from feeling guilty for dumping your feelings on someone, you hated yourself for spilling them all over Jaemin of all people. Jaemin, who always smiled and didn’t deserve to be burdened with your self-inflicted troubles. Jaemin, who flirted with you, and somehow liked you, and didn’t want to hear about your boyfriend.

“I don’t think you have to apologize. To me or to him.” Jaemin’s smile slowly returned, and guilt eased its clutch around you. “No offense, but anyone who doesn’t want to hang out with you and Jisung is a loser. And I’m not just saying that because I like—”

Your soaring heart came crashing down when Haechan cheered, “We come bearing pizza!” The other boys followed behind him, each carrying two boxes of pizza.

Renjun returned Jaemin’s debit card and the bows sat around the table. Jisung sat at your side and smiled brightly even as Jaemin glared.

“Do you think you got enough to eat?” Jaemin furrowed his brow. “Seriously, guys, ten pizzas are excessive! You can’t just take advantage of my generosity and—”

“Jaemin,” you interrupted calmly, fighting the urge to giggle with the other boys. “It’s okay. If it matters so much, I’ll pay you back.”

“What?” He gasped. “No, don’t! Besides, money isn’t the point!”

“Generosity!” Chenle cackled and flicked a piece of pepperoni at Jaemin; he dodged the attack. “You just bought us dinner to impress Jisung’s sister!”

The others, excluding Jisung, chorused, “Ooooh.” All, except the laughing Mark, partook in flinging pizza toppings at Jaemin.

Burning a faint shade of pink from his neck up, Jaemin screeched, “Hey! Cut it out! I dressed nicely and—”

Jeno wiggled his eyebrows before sinking his teeth into a slice of cheese pizza. “Jaemin dressed nicely to impress Jisung’s sister!”

And the boys—minus Jisung, who sat quietly, cheeks stuffed full—again sang “Ooooh,” until you and Jaemin were both colored crimson.

In what must have been an attempt to defend you from his friends’ teasing, Jisung swallowed his mouthful and chirped, “She has a name!”

Jisung’s attempt backfired.

The boys sang, “Ooooh! Jaemin and Y/N, sitting in a tree. . .”

As you laughed out loud for the first time all night, Jaemin’s annoyance or embarrassment vanished. Grinning, he flew out of his seat, grabbed you by the hand, and pulled you toward the arcade. He said, “I hope you got all the pizza you wanted!”

Although you couldn’t care less about eating more pizza, you yelled over laughter and games, “You don’t think they’ll leave me any?”

Jaemin said, “Jisung might try to save you some, but it’ll get cold if one of the guys doesn’t steal it. You and I are gonna be here for a while.” He dropped your hand to point up at a shelf of plush prizes. “Which one do you want?”

The giant mint green llama instantly caught your eye. You fumbled with an answer because, “Jaemin, those cost, like, 5,000 tickets!”

He retrieved a neon green play card from his back pocket, twirled it between his fingers, and winked. “4,902 electronic tickets, baby! Pick your prize, and we’ll get the other 98 tickets!”

“How—why?” You stuttered, flustered by Jaemin’s unromantic use of the word ‘baby.’

“I come here a lot,” Jaemin shrugged, “and I already have a bunch of those plushes. It’s a little childish, but they always make me feel better when I’m feeling down.”

Oh. So this was his response to your rambling about your boyfriend. He wouldn’t tell you to break up with him as your girlfriends did before moving on to the next topic of idle gossip. He wouldn’t sulk with you like Jisung. Jaemin would go out of his way to teach you to have fun.

“Pick one!” Jaemin urged again, brushing his elbow against your ribs until you went weak with laughter. Before you could trip over your own feet, he secured you around the waist. His gaze followed where you pointed. “Ah, the llama. Cute. Let’s go!” He grabbed your hand and sped to the wall of skeeball machines because, he explained, that game was the quickest—and most fun!— way to earn tickets.

“We don’t have to run everywhere,” you wheezed, doubling over.

As he knelt to swipe his play card, Jaemin looked up and stole your little remaining breath with his smile. “Come on, breathlessness is part of the fun!” After watching you scramble to pull your card out of your pocket, Jaemin swiped his through your machine.

“Jaemin!” You swatted at him gently when he stood upright, and he spun away from the contact. “I’m supposed to pay for the games! That’s what we agreed on!”

Your scolding elicited a burst of laughter. Shaking his card at you, Jaemin defended himself. “The points are on my card.” You wrinkled your forehead, and he continued, “If you want that adorable llama, you gotta let me pay.”

Because he turned his attention to his game and started launching ball after ball into the center target, he didn’t see your small smile. You mirrored his posture as you started your game and said, “Under that cute exterior, you’re really quite cunning.”

Rather than fixating on the insult, Jaemin noticed the compliment. “Cute,” he mimicked your high pitch. “You think I’m cute?” He glanced at you and snorted as your ball sank into the gutter. “Oops! Am I too cute? Am I distracting you?”

Your blush was washed out by the blinking arcade lights. “You’re not distracting me because you’re cute.” You balanced the lie with a partial truth: “You’re distracting because you’re annoying.”

“Ouch,” He whistled. His game announced, ‘New High Score!’ and he celebrated by pumping a fist into the air. He turned to you and said, “Every time I think you’re starting to like me back just a little, you cut me right back down.”

Well aware of how flirtatiously Jaemin would interpret your words, you decided to say, ‘I do like you.’ The words were dancing on the tip of your tongue, but you swallowed them back when Jisung and his friends approached.

“Found ‘em!” Haechan declared like you had been playing hide-and-seek.

This is a good thing, you told yourself as your game ended without all the fanfare Jaemin’s high score earned. I would have regretted confusing Jaemin’s feelings. Some true things are better left unsaid.

“These kids are ruining the experience,” Jaemin grumbled. Shoving his hands into the pockets of light blue acid-washed jeans, he asked the boys, “What do you need now?”

“We just wanted to check in on our favorite budding romance.” Renjun’s jest received laughter from the other boys and a dramatic eyeroll from Jaemin.

“Find your own romances and stop following us like a bunch of weirdos,” Jaemin suggested.

Jisung stepped up to your side. “Want these?” His hands cupped a rainbow assortment of hard candies. “I won them!” Your brother beamed at his accomplishment when you popped a candy into your mouth.

Stuffing a wrapper and a couple of pieces into your pockets, you smiled at him. “Thank you, Jisung!” The cherry-flavored jawbreaker muffled your voice. You nearly choked on your laughter when Jisung bent to let you pat his head.

Chenle said, “Now that the adorable sibling bonding is out of the way, we’re gonna play laser tag. We know you two—” his eyes flickered from you to Jaemin—“would rather make out by the skeeball machines—”

You gasped, and Jisung shouted, “Hey!” He stomped to Chenle and towered over him. Jisung’s height alone would have been daunting if he didn’t have the face of a baby even when glowering. “Don’t say stuff like that! She’s my sister!”

Chenle’s hands rose in mock surrender. “I’m not the one making out with—”

“Anyway—” Jeno intervened by stepping between Chenle and Jisung—“We’re gonna play laser tag if you wanna tag along!” Jeno laughed at his pun.

Jaemin shook his head, and his bangs fell into his eyes. “We’re not gonna play. Thanks for asking.”

“We’re not?” You wrinkled your forehead.

You weren’t offended by Jaemin’s eagerness to speak on your behalf. You were just surprised that he didn’t run at the opportunity to explore the arcade with his friends. That was why he showed up, right? To spend time with Jisung.

Chenle hummed, “Ooooh, trouble in paradise!”

Jaemin ignored him. He explained through a nervous grin, “We can’t get tickets from playing laser tag. If we want that llama, we gotta stay focused!”

“What llama?” Mark asked. He received no answer.

Jisung’s eyes widened as he sucked on a piece of candy. “You’re not gonna pay tag?”

You didn’t withstand your brother’s disappointed stare because you wanted to win a silly stuffed animal. This was wrong. Now, you thought, you actually deserved your boyfriend’s disapproval. You enjoyed having Jaemin’s attention to yourself.

That’s why you grinned and cheered, “We gotta win that llama!” You earned a high five from Jaemin.

Teasing you must have lost its appeal. Wordlessly nodding, the boys set off to play laser tag. Jisung lingered, still staring at you. Realizing that Jisung would otherwise be left behind, Renjun ushered him away, muttering, “You’ll understand when you’re older.”

Neither of you spoke for a few minutes after Jaemin started another round of skeeball.

The silence ended when Jaemin said, “You don’t have to look so guilty.” His voice, softer than usual, was almost lost amid booming sound effects, laughter, and screams of triumph and despair. “Jisung won’t stay hung up on us for long. He’s pretty adaptable.”

You couldn’t explain that the twisting in your gut had little to do with the look you put on Jisung’s face. You couldn’t explain that spending this time with Jaemin was inappropriate. Then, you would have to stop out of respect for your never-present boyfriend.

And you didn’t want to stop. And you didn’t want to ruin the playful atmosphere. And you didn’t want to overwhelm Jaemin’s crush on you if it were as shallow as you imagined.

We’re just having fun, you argued to the nagging voice in the back of your mind.

The voice in your mind sounded a lot like the one booming in your ears, the voice of your boyfriend, the voice that stunned you stiff.

Those defensive thoughts weren’t just thoughts. They were stuttered excuses you forced through trembling lips as he glared down at you. His fingers dug into your arms so roughly that it would have hurt if you weren’t embarrassed—numb. Numb except for the agonizing thundering of your heart.

People were staring. People were listening to him scold you. “I wouldn’t have bothered coming to this stupid place if I’d known you were here to hook up with some stupid jerk you found at the claw machine.”

He cut his eyes at Jaemin, and you with the realization that you were not trapped in a dream turned nightmare. He wouldn’t disappear with the opening of your eyes. Yet, you blinked once, twice, thrice, in the hope that he would.

Jaemin was as stunned as you were. Dark maroon splotches formed on every visible inch of his skin. His chest rapidly rose and fell under his white t-shirt. His hands were clenched in tight fists pressed to his side. His jaw was forced shut, lips pressed into a thin line.

“He is not a stupid jerk.” Emboldened by the instinct to stand up for Jaemin, you didn’t shrink under your boyfriend’s cold, piercing stare. “And we aren’t even hooking up!” You liked Jaemin, and that perversion of your relationship made your hair stand on end. “He’s my friend.”

“Your friend.” Your boyfriend’s laugh was hollow. Again, he was going to remind you that nobody was interested in you. Jabbing a finger at Jaemin without breaking your eye contact, he accused, “He is no more interested in ‘friendship’ with you than I am.”

At some point, you would have believed it. At some point, those words would have hurt you. But they had been spoken so often that they lost their sting. He had always been like this— cruel— even when you tried to will yourself oblivious. Until now, you forced yourself to say whatever might guarantee temporary peace.

What was so different now?

Maybe now that you realized there were people like Jaemin who would enjoy your company without the promise of anything in return, you couldn’t subject yourself to mistreatment. Maybe Jaemin’s smile broke through the darkness your boyfriend insisted encompassed the entire world. Maybe Jaemin’s smile exposed your relationship’s emptiness. Maybe you finally understood that there was nothing there worth saving with forced silence.

“Let go of me.” You met your boyfriend’s eyes. Your voice wavered slightly because the words were unfamiliar in your mouth. “Go away. You don’t want anything to do with me, and I don’t want anything to do with you either. So just— just—”

The tears that pooled in his eyes were inauthentic. Although you recognized his deliberate attempt at manipulation, you couldn’t say the final word. You continued to tread that dangerous line between freedom and captivity, between apology and honesty, until he pushed you away.

You couldn’t even be relieved. He turned and towered over Jaemin, who was not intimidated by his size. Jaemin, who stood proudly when faced with the force that had been strangling you, extinguishing you for months.

“Ease up, dude,” your boyfriend growled.“I’m not gonna hit you.”

Jaemin did not change his posture, and your boyfriend clicked his tongue in annoyance. You flinched at the sound, and Jaemin didn’t bat an eyelash.

“Whatever,” your boyfriend spat. “You want her so badly?” Jaemin nodded, but your boyfriend didn’t notice. He turned to watch you crumble as he said, “Take her, then. I only went out with her because she begged me.”

You weren’t winded so much by what he said. You decided just moments ago that he could not determine your worth. But how could cruelty come so easily to anybody? How could he easily turn away from his latest attempt to break you when you could never work up the nerve to peacefully walk away from him? You couldn’t understand.

You couldn’t quite process the public breakup until you noticed that the once bustling arcade had gone silent. There were a few scattered whispers—all about you. The breakup was not quite real until you felt the eyes of strangers prying into you. The humiliation didn’t quite dawn on you until you met Jaemin’s gaze—overwhelmed, frightened, saddened.

Jaemin’s stare. That’s what drove you to seek solace on a bench under the moonlight sky.

The unseasonably cool blowing breeze reminded you that you never deserved to hold Jaemin’s attention. What had he even seen in you that day you stormed into the cafe to retrieve Jisung? You had been sweaty, irritable, and dismissive of his friendship with Jisung and his inexplicable interest in you. You were undesirable in appearance and in deed; yet Jaemin could smile at you. You couldn’t understand.

After that confrontation, he would never smile at you the same way. How weak must you have sounded, stuttering like a fool? How foolish must you have seemed for allowing someone so careless and cruel to stand close to your heart?

Weak. Foolish. Undesirable. Unworthy.

The words you thought of yourself were unfair and untrue, but you could not stop thinking them. In an effort to ignore the thoughts you couldn’t control, you pulled your phone out of your pocket. Gifsets were always guaranteed to brighten your mood.

Your phone only sowed your mood, though. After dismissing a wall of texts from your boyfriend—well, ex-boyfriend—you read a text from your friend. She sent you a screenshot of your ex’s Instagram account. He posted a picture of himself kissing another girl with the caption: ‘Guess I don’t have to keep the love of my life secret anymore. Guess we were both seeing other people.’

The screen went black, and you slammed the phone down at your side. After publicly accusing you of cheating with Jaemin, your ex revealed the reason why he never wanted you, why he preferred to go days without talking, and why he never wanted to spend any time with you. There was somebody else. The problem was never you. The problem was always him.

Somehow—deep down, or right at the surface—you had always known. Rather than feeling relieved or vindicated, you hated yourself for ignoring your parents and Jisung and the careful voice in your head that said, ‘let go, run.’ That careful voice started warning you long before you met Jaemin, long before you started falling for his smile slowly and then all at once. Why hadn’t you listened?

Footsteps slapped on the pavement from afar, and you sucked a breath in. Nobody could see you, not until you had worked through your storm of emotions. You tugged your legs, bare below your striped shorts, onto the bench and contorted to conceal yourself in the building’s shadow.

Jaemin found you with little effort. He wasted no time in running to you and sitting beside you as closely as he had at school days ago. His eyes were different now. They were wide with concern, no longer sparkling with mischief.

Unable to stand how he looked at you—like you were breaking—you crossed your arms over your knees and buried your face in the bend of your elbow. You begged, “Stop looking at me like that, Jaemin.”

Although he had done nothing wrong, Jaemin apologized. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry that happened, and I’m sorry I caused it—”

“You didn’t cause it.” Your urge to console Jaemin overwhelmed your urge to hide. You lowered your feet onto the concret. To comfort him, you rested your arm on the back of the bench, just behind his shoulders. “That guy—he’s always been a big—”

You wouldn’t have known how to describe your ex-boyfriend if your phone hadn’t interrupted you with a sharp buzz. Jaemin grabbed your phone, and the screen lit up in his hand.

Jaemin’s mouth fell open. “He—he had the nerve to scream at you in front of all those people when he’s been kissing—” Rage tightened around Jaemin’s vocal cords, and he shoved the phone back into the narrow space between your bodies. “I don’t get it. People like that—how do they get anyone to like them? And how can they just treat people—why do they— I—” He raked his fingers through his hair, drawing a deep ragged breath.

Staring up at the moon and willing your voice to stay even, you mumbled, “I don’t get it either. I guess—you know—I read once that we accept the love we think we deserve.”

Did you believe that line you found in a book? Is that why you could never break things off? Is that why you could never demand better for yourself?

Jaemin pulled his legs onto the bench and crossed them so he could face you fully. “Hey.” He reached for your hand. This time there was no playful grin when you didn’t flinch from his touch. Once you mirrored his posture to face him, he said, “You deserve better. A lot better. And by that, I don’t mean that you deserve me, even though I’d like—”

As if you weren’t leaning into his every word, Jaemin caught his tongue and stared down at his hand holding yours.

When words failed, you returned his small act of affection by curling your fingers around his hand. “I really want to deserve you, Jaemin. Someday soon.”

Had you given in to the desire to look at him, you would have seen his eyebrows knitting together as he said, “I don’t know what you mean. If it has anything to do with what that jerk said—”

“It doesn’t,” you said despite your failed efforts to silence his nagging voice in the corner of your mind. “You’re just so bright and beautiful, and I was quick to judge you for yelling at Jisung, and—”

He asked, “Wait, when did I—oh. Are you talking about when I got onto him that time after work?”

You nodded slowly, tracing over his knuckles. “And when you yelled at him over that video game.”

“You heard that?” At his feeble tone, you finally looked up at Jaemin. In the pale moonlight, his blush was a glowing pink. He scratched at the back of his neck with his free hand. “I’m sorry. I apologized to Jisung, too. I guess it’s not an excuse, but my temper isn’t all that great when I lose games. And that time after work—”

“I know you weren’t trying to bully him,” you said. “You were trying to help him improve. Now I know that you just like to nag—”

Jaemin huffed, “I do not nag!” You bit back laughter.

“— and I’m sorry that I misunderstood you. It’s not an excuse, but I’m protective of Jisung because he’s the most precious person in the world. I didn’t know that you knew that too. I’m sorry.”

Jaemin blinked, unsure of what to do with your apologies. He said, “I like that you’re protective of Jisung. I like that when some big jerk is yelling at you, you think to defend me from his stupid insults. That’s who you are, and it’s nothing to apologize for—especially because I like you.”

He liked you. After all of that chaos, Jaemin still liked you. Such a small word— like— meant so much. You couldn’t remember the last time someone who wasn’t Jisung said it to you and meant it. You didn’t try to fight the smile tugging at your lips.

If you were defined by your protectiveness of Jisung and Jaemin, then Jaemin was defined by buying pizza for his friends (and nagging about it), offering a hard-earned collection of 4,902 tickets to brighten your day with a cute stuffed animal, and holding your hand in the aftermath of utter humiliation.

You couldn’t keep the fact to yourself, and you didn’t want to: “I like you too, Jaemin.”

He looked at you. Silence hung in the air as you stood together on the edge of something new. Should you say something to define it? Would taking that dive dampen the chemistry that formed despite old oppressive labels?

You didn’t agonize long before Jaemin leaped off the bench and extended his hand to you. “Come on,” he implored, wearing that broad smile that gave your heart wings to soar from its broken restraints. “We gotta go win that llama!”

You didn’t hesitate to take his hand. You didn’t hesitate to seize the moment with him, wherever it led.

. . .

Had you expected there to be so many college-aged students sitting around and sipping down lattes and munching through muffins, you wouldn’t have rushed into the cafe from the chilly Autumn breeze. You would have held onto the sunshine yellow gift bag longer and sought Jaemin at school. You had been standing in line far too long to walk away without achieving your goal, so you stood in line until Jeno noticed you.

From behind the register, he called your name. He motioned you to the front, deaf to the groan of customers who resented your special treatment. He yelled into the kitchen, “Jaemin, it’s time for your break!” Jeno shot you a soothing thumbs-up and returned to serving customers.

“Huh?” Jaemin filled the doorway. His brow was furrowed and lips were pursed as he argued, “I’m not scheduled—”

He gasped at the sight of you. He removed his chocolate-stained cream apron and rounded the counter. Combing his fingers through his hair, he said, “Jisung isn’t here, you know.”

“I know.” You nodded. “I’m not here for Jisung.”

He asked, “Then why—”

Jaemin’s eyes fell on the gift bag, and he flashed his signature breath-taking smile. “Oh, I see!” He wagged a finger as he crossed the dark-tiled floor. He grabbed your hand and led you out into the golden afternoon.

You sat together on the bench outside of the cafe. Hugging you to his side, he beamed, “You couldn’t resist seeing me on my birthday!”

You teased, “For once, your delusions are spot on.” You clutched the gift bag and glanced around at the browning treeline. “Is this our thing, Nana? Sitting on benches and holding hands?”

A blush colored his face whenever you called him by his nickname. His blush never failed to tickle your heart. “Yep,” he hummed and laced his fingers (warm) through yours (cold). “I’m not gonna have to let go when I open that present, am I?”

His free hand reached out for the gift, and you couldn’t cling to it any longer. Sucking in a breath, you watched as he yanked out the white tissue paper. You released the breath only when his eyes sparkled while he freed the pink plush llama from the bag.

“Did you win this from the arcade?” Jaemin’s smile, already too big for this dull world, grew with the nod of your head.

“I can’t take all the credit.” You giggled when Jaemin touched the llama’s muzzle to your face again and again in time with the puckering of his lips. “The idea was all mine, but Jisung helped me earn the tickets. Obviously, we’re not as good at games as you are—” Jaemin winked at the flattery—“so that’s why the prize isn’t as big as the one you won for me once upon a time.”

Jaemin didn’t seem to think less of the gift because of its size. “This is the best birthday!” he yelled into the cloudy autumn sky. He released your hand only so he could hug the llama to his chest. “Thank you so much!”

Your heart softened. “You’re welcome!” Looking into the bag, you added, “I think there’s a card too.”

You didn’t think. You knew there was a card without having to look into the bag for the thousandth time that day. The card—more specifically, the note inside—was what made your nerves tremble.

Although you wanted some relief from the pounding of your heart, you couldn’t keep your eyes from admiring Jaemin’s face as he laughed at the silly googly-eyed puppy on the card’s front. You couldn’t keep your gaze focused on the llama lying face up in his lap. You had to watch the lines deepen around his smile when his eyes darted up after studying your handwriting.

“Ooooh,” Jaemin whistled at having caught you studying him. “You have a crush on me!”

You started, “I—”

“And you can’t deny it!” He flipped the card, and you were faced with your curly pink lettering. Finally, too embarrassed, you looked away. He boasted, “Here it is in writing!”

Were Jaemin anyone else in the world, he would have been cruel. He cleared his throat and prepared to read your confession aloud. He pressed his cloud-soft palm to yours as he recited, “‘Nana, I never thought you would become my best friend’— after Jisung, I’m assuming— ‘And I never imagined that someone so bright and beautiful could exist in my life and steal my heart, but you have. You have, and I love you, and I’m ready to tell you.’”

Jaemin looked at you again, this time without any trace of playfulness. This time, he waited for you to catch your breath.

He was good at waiting for you. He had been from the day you stomped into the cafe. He proved his patience over the last few months by giving you all the pleasures of friendship—all the joys of having an adorable boy to text at any hour, to laugh with too loudly at lunch, to sit with on two-person benches until seconds turned into minutes that turned into hours. He didn’t seem tired of waiting for your romance to start because, really, it had already started.

But you were tired of waiting to call him yours. You admitted, “It’s not a crush, Jaemin. I’m in love with you.”

He must not have been surprised. He didn’t gasp, his eyes didn’t widen, and he didn’t miss a beat before responding, “I really want to be your boyfriend. I don’t need the title to love you too, obviously, but I want it as soon as you’re ready. Please.”

You had been ready for a while, but you forced yourself to wait for Jaemin. While Jaemin probably thought that you were testing his devotion, that couldn’t have been further from the truth. Contrary to Jisung’s assumption (that you were waiting for certainty of your feelings), you did not once doubt the butterflies that had not stopped fluttering in your belly since you started cuddling with the mint-green llama to fall asleep.

Maybe nobody else could understand that you were waiting for the wounds inflicted by your ex-boyfriend to heal. You never again wanted to bleed on Jaemin. You were waiting for the day that you could be as bright as the sun too.

That day had finally come, so you wasted no time in promising, “Okay, Nana. I’m ready.”

Jaemin didn’t as for any clarification or justification of your feelings. Maybe he was afraid that you would change your mind if you were asked to repeat yourself. Maybe he sensed your confidence. After pumping a celebratory fist in the air, he wore a victorious grin. You couldn’t resist capturing his smile in a long-awaited whisper of a kiss.

BONUS SCENE:

“You’re almost as dangerous in the kitchen as Jisung is,” Jaemin fussed. He knocked you away from the oven by bumping your hips with his own. He made a spectacle of pulling canary yellow oven mitts over his hands. “These keep you from getting burned by 350° cookie sheets, silly!”

You rolled your eyes at the reprimand while Jaemin pulled the chocolate chip cookies out of the oven and gingerly set them on the counter. “Yeah, yeah,” you huffed. You were accustomed to his eagerness to show you up anywhere and everywhere, especially in the kitchen, where years of experience at the cafe gave him a clear advantage.

After turning the oven off and closing its door, Jaemin pointed and giggled at your pout. ��Aw, don’t be sulky, baby!” He dropped the oven mitts into their drawer. Crossing the distance between you in two steps, he pressed his palms flat on the countertop at your sides. He lowered his face to be level with yours. “You’re kinda cute when you pout, though.”

Butterflies fluttered in your stomach as Jaemin’s breath ghosted your lips. It wasn’t fair that you were always the breathless one. Quickly, before he could act first, you stretched to brush your lips against his.

His chocolate-flavored gasp was a short-lived reward. Always ready to adapt, always searching for a way to tease you, Jaemin was quick to turn your sweet, playful kiss into something that made your skin burn scarlet and your legs turn to jelly.

“Ah!” Jisung screamed, and you pushed Jaemin away with all of your strength. Jisung never failed to slap a hand over his eyes after catching you deep in a kiss with Jaemin. His discoveries were growing in frequency, and his tolerance was wearing thin. He groaned, “No place is safe! Not the cafe— not even during work hours. Not the car when you two pick me up after school—”

Jaemin suggested, “You could take the bus!”

Jisung continued, “Not the arcade. Definitely not the movie theater after last time. Now, not the kitchen! Now, I can’t even walk around my own home without getting jumpscared!”

Because Jisung rarely raised his voice, you were stunned silent. Jaemin, meanwhile, encouraged him, “You can walk around. Maybe just knock on doors first.”

“There isn’t a door!” Jisung pressed his back against a wall and gestured to the empty archway connecting the living room to the kitchen. “And you’re missing the point!”

“What is the point?” You hoped to make Jisung the target of Jaemin’s teasing. When Jisung dropped the hand covering his eyes to gawk at you, you wrapped your arms around Jaemin’s waist and pressed a kiss to his cheek. “I thought you wanted me to like Jaemin.”

“Not like this!” Jisung’s whine struck a devilish spark in Jaemin’s eyes. Your mission was a success: Jaemin’s eyes fixed on your little brother.

Frowning, Jaemin leaned into your embrace. “That’s not what you said when you gave me permission to ask her out!”

Jisung cried, “I thought she would reject you again!”

When Jaemin gasped and pretended to faint in your arms, you laughed. You asked, “Well, Jisung, will any of my boyfriends meet your standards?”

“I don’t care that you’re dating.” Jisung tore his eyes away from Jaemin’s theatrics to root through the cabinets in search of a snack. The tips of his ears were blistered pink. “It’s just—the PDA—”

“Here.” Jaemin offered him a cookie. “It’s not PDA if we’re not in public.”

“Not this time,” Jisung grumbled through his mouthful of sugar. He asked you, “When do you think you’ll get tired of kissing Jaemin? I need to know when I can start walking around with my eyes open again.”

Jaemin climbed onto the granite countertop and poked out his bottom lip. “Yeah! When are you gonna get tired of me?”

There was only one way to answer.

“Never, of course!” You cheered before pecking at Jaemin’s smiling lips.

“Shameless!” Jisung shrieked, running out of the kitchen with a handful of cookies. “Absolutely shameless!”

You and Jaemin shared in the golden laughter that colored your every day together.

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