#i could probably make kt through the day without eating almost anything if i did what i know but i also knoe thats bad lol

[theood]

Sometimes I hope moving will magically make my relationship with my parents better and then I feel guilty because everyone thought I had such cool parents so I must be making up everything that made my childhood suck and I did have good childhood memories it wasn't always like this so really truly it must be me faking for attention

[txtdol]

01. fastening my heart to every flying thing (week 3)

I started spring split with LCK in mind: I'd catch every kt Rolster and Kongdoo Monster game I could and every second-half SKT game. As the season progressed, I picked up Misfits -- they, at least, played in the afternoon for my timezone, so there was no need to make the "sleep vs LCS" balancing every LCK team forced me into. Thursday was the perfect storm for me: Longzhu vs Kongdoo at 2AM my time, followed by kt vs Afreeca at 5AM, closing out with Misfits at 1PM. I'd stay up, I told myself -- it'll be my first LCK all-nighter.

Instead, of course, on Monday I was told I'd have to fly out for a two-day work trip on Thursday.

My flight was at 7AM. Having been up until 1AM packing and finishing last-minute work prep, I dragged my bleary body out of bed right as kt and Afreeca started their draft and followed game one as I washed my face and did my makeup. In the ride over to the airport, I fretted over my LCS score app, which refused to load any information about what had happened during the Longzhu vs Kongdoo match and was defiantly showing me a 0-0 tally. "This idol group was not ready to debut," my friend had groused two hours before. "Goodbye, cruel world, Kongdoo will win a game someday, I think." So at least they had lost, I thought, as kt closed out game one and I fumbled getting out of the car, trying to balance my phone over my laptop bag so I could watch the camera pan over a sad-looking Kuro.

Passing through security got me through the intermission between two games and into the draft for game two. I had a plan: I'd buy some breakfast and hole up with my phone up until the last minute so I could catch as much of game two as I could before I'd have to meet my coworker at the gate and pretend I was definitely not the kind of person who would get up at 2AM to watch an esports game half a world away in Korea. Instead, while I had my mouth full of breakfast sandwich and was screaming, Renekton? Renekton?? to myself, my co-worker cheekily sat down next to me. "Is this seat taken?" they asked, putting down their cup of coffee. I despaired at losing my last chance at catching the end of the kt vs Afreeca game, but turned away from my phone and took out my earbuds anyway. It was 6:20AM, we made small talk about what we needed to accomplish on the trip, all while I furtively snuck looks at my YouTube app and typed out "mata wrud" with one greasy hand when he stupidly wandered too far forward and was cut down for his disrespect.

LOL is my first fandom where the "canon" is competitive. I've never been in a sports fandom; in fact, before this, I’d never had a team that was mine, that I cared about and invested in. Sure, in kpop, there were weekly rankings -- who topped whom in the Melon charts, who was selling more, who would win the end of the year music awards. But it didn't matter the same way winning or losing matters in competitive LOL, or any sports for that matter. I've never believed that your favorite anything has to be the best, but it's extra hard to see the players you like get down on themselves for a bad game, or have to bear the endless wankery about who is the better toplaner, or who is shitting the bed on their new team because of their rankings. In kpop or anime, there's room for everyone and there's no arguing about taste. In LOL, you can argue however much you want, but there's a winner and a loser.

When I put my phone on airplane mode, kt hadn't yet lost, but it was clearly coming. In a pessimistic mood from Kongdoo's third two-game loss in a row, I fretted through my flight, sure that the rest of my day would be equally bad news: kt was finally going to drop a game at least, and probably the whole match, Misfits was going to lose their game to Fnatic, Kongdoo will probably have to go through the promotion tournament again, and I was going to be stuck with almost no internet connection for the next two days, worrying and knowing my worry will change nothing. Why did I sign myself up for this? All this anxiety and despair for nothing. Why did people do this to themselves?

There was a moment when our plane had reached cruising altitude and it broke through a heavy blanket of clouds just as the sun was coming up, lighting up every edge with a rosy, golden yellow glow. I think of it now because when I landed, I used the last of the airport internet to check the score: kt had won. I spent most of Thursday low-key wishing for bathroom breaks so I could go to the one spot on location that had a modicum (3G!) of internet connection and check to see whether my adopted team of rodents were winning. When they did, my score app, which had stubbornly refused to show me anything all day, suddenly blazed back into life, spitting out all of the morning's matches in an excited stream of vibrating notifications. It didn't change anything about my Thursday and Friday, which was uniformly awful: hours of constant talking and note-taking, eating poorly and at one point shivering outdoors in a windy 40 degrees without a coat because we got locked out of our meeting room and there was a sudden, unexpected cold snap. But there was a gold edge to my day that only I could see: my teams had won. Okay, not all of them, but at least two.

I think it's a good assumption that when Li-Young Lee wrote "One Heart," he wasn't thinking of esports. But, and maybe it's just happy coincidence that I learned this about myself while I was on a plane, suspended in mid-air, watching the sun come up, I think of the line "the first sky / is inside you, open / at either end of day." It's funny to consider the happiness and despair that exists within us, unconnected to anything in our real lives, which finds a conduit in things like esports or fandom. In caring for these teams, I've made myself deeply, pointlessly unhappy for no reason, but happiness is inside us, open at either end. Investing in these teams and people half a world away has given me a happiness that costs me nothing. I fastened my heart, and let it do the work of wings.