#i think it's especially difficult for people whose livelihoods are artistic in nature not to find their identity in the work of their hands

[sailforvalinor]

"We need not look anywhere but to the eyes of our Savior for our true identity, an identity which is profoundly complex, unfathomable, deep as the sea, and yet can be boiled down to one little word: beloved. That's it. And that's why it's so silly (and perilous) to use your gifting to clothe yourself with meaning. Those clothes will never quite fit.

I once heard someone suggest that in the new creation, the work of our hands will at last be equal to what we were able to imagine. But in the meantime, living as we do in dying bodies in a dying world, our best work always falls short of the initiating vision. Toil and trouble, thistle and thorn, we push through the brush and come out bloody on the other side, only to realize we've ascended a false peak. It's difficult, yes. But it doesn't change a thing about who we are."

-Andrew Peterson, Adorning the Dark

[wallkickswillwork]

signal jamming

incoherency is comforting because of the narrative weve been fed our whole entire lives that in order to be palatable media must in some way be complete and have beveled, well-defined edges rather than being a mess of finger paints, bright colors, strange dialogues and verbiage, build trees of moods.

thoughts on: -futuristic anime, 90s anime and the unique sense of mood in toonami shows. they are a very good series of shows for people who are coming of age and who must slowly be forced to reckon with the industrialization and mercenary nature of adult life, as it is increasingly held captive by capitalism. there is also something essentially spiritual about it, especially shows like precure and dbz, where an interior or exterior-made-interior force is responsible for the protagonists' success in the face of an oppressive world-system. under capitalism, it frequently is the case that the entire world or entirety-of-world is against us. heroes must overcome overwhelming odds to leave their mark on a gauntlet of greats. -cowboy bebop, final fantasy 7, metroid as meditations on loss, urbanization, dating back to blade runner. this is a type of meditation that is present in much of cyberpunk, but its also not exclusively cyberpunk, and can extend in nature to non-cyberpunk works.

thinking about necrobarista and how its attempting to "resuscitate" anime, while this approach doesnt really examine what contemporary anime like jojos, precure, and slightly more dated anime like hidaske and nichijou do well. if we get all this tunnel vision for gurren lagann and flcl we can never look forward. i think a lot of the visual work that needs to be done is probably in movies. i think maybe there could be work done to marry cinema proper with its animated counterpart. steven universe seems like it gets it, and there are some anime that really seemed like they got it. i dont think were beyond salvation.

-listening to the whos "tommy" and thinking about how trauma and the humanity of that trauma is experienced and lived-through by the main character in socratic fashion. these stories are discussed by people whose actual, authentic experience of trauma irl is doubtful at best. they are great successes on stage who dont struggle in the sense that an actual victim would struggle. calls to mind how a lot of freuds patients would fabricate csa in order to fulfill the expectations of the therapist. but in other cases, actual patients with csa would repress their experiences or not feel comfortable discussing. so thats how i feel about gurus like meher baba or i guess alan watts. less trustworthy and more like scam artists. i do believe in what they teach, however. i think that a guru can teach the truth even if that guru is a liar. maybe its the truth, but the guru doesnt know it to be true, or else, the way the guru teaches it is untrue.

-for a while i imagined my own autism to be the result of childhood trauma that was repressed, but later emerged that those memories were fabricated, to my knowledge, and was left wondering.

-learning to regard the world with a sense of wonder from media like cowboy bebop and ff7. these worlds are jaded and decaying realities but there is a sense of awe at the vast, uncompromising reality. truly vast, sprawling and yawning cities and vast starry skies up above. beholding these things and beholding the starry skies and huge cities of our own planet surely stirs something in me.

-fantasy anime tends to go the joke route like slayers or else the route of "we are all kids, bro, stuck in an mmo" and i think this is mostly due to the admittedly antiquated setting of high fantasy in european trochets and history which to japanese people probably feel like white person set dressing and as they should, i mean. there are more high fantasy themes in something like inuyasha and japans history can be feudal, edo, the meiji restoration, primordial like princess mononoke, etc, so theres more wiggle room for historical works there. slayers et al is usually reduced to "characters moving around the forest" which is almost like this grand slice of the collective anime consciousness as it stands overlapping with, say, pokemon, to the extent where its one of the cliche anime things everyone thinks about, alongside high school, robots, nurses, etc.

-another thing to which we could probably ascribe the success of something like slayers to is wizardry and by proxy dragon quest. small graph paper monster garden games. the appeal is entirely mathematical so there are only a few directions that anime directors tend to run with it (goofy gag comedy if youre making a show or cut and dried authentic dungeon crawlers with moe characters instead of the usual dbz ones). going off what you definitely learn in japanese history class if youre a japanese student, for starters, there are thousands of years of chinese history, so you have romance of 3 kingdoms type stuff. or you have high school romances accounting for the various fire emblems where the appeal becomes game of thronesy "which of my characters in dragon quest land can i make kiss each other and myself", very good ground to cover as we start asking the important questions. theres samurai stuff as we already know, drawing on years of samurai media, kurosawas films and zen spirituality, art of the blade type stuff, jeet kune do in some instances and reaching so far afield as to probably raise some interesting and important questions about pan-asiatic cultural identity which this author (white) is ill-advised to answer. but reeling it back in, the question mostly being of history, and how a lot of fantasy media draws more from History proper as a codified cultural body than histories being individuated familial experiences. its true that when a work does something unique with history (earthbounds hippy dippy approach to the 1960s, undertales handling of furry culture, yume nikkis south american murals) its tended to be seen as that works "thing" as if because hulk hogan was an all american wrestler that precluded john cena from being same, or at least, embodying a similar if slightly modified niche. nobody can make a hippy dippy rpg now or something because itd just be called an earthbound ripoff rather than a loving homage. and i think thats wrong headed and how genres become stillborn rather than invented and developed upon. we have this vast morass of stuff from the 20th century and we could be developing various 60s, 70s, 80s fantasies. hindsight is 20/20 i guess. who knows, we could see bluff city become something in 50 years time.

i feel this is because of extreme stringent expectations of intellectual property laws and their dissemination into everyday discourse online. i dont really like or agree with monolithic cultural expectations like intellectual property or *shudder* advertising, but only to the extent where i can acknowledge that whether or not i agree with them is irrelevant to their all-consuming scope and the need for marxists to actively combat them. its one thing to say "x is bad" and another to clamor for urgency of fighting x, which is, if you believe what we read every day about global warming, too late, so its not important. nevertheless there are a multiplicity of settings that could be developed into genres and identities and ideologues that rarely are if only because it would be seen as "oh yeah like that other thing". people are fickle and develop dwarflike strange moods when it comes to defining what constitutes original versus hackneyed and derivative. i think its mostly dictated by star signs and the weather.

so lately if you follow me on twitter youve probably noticed im doing sort of a tweet concrete kind of thing where i post plaintext quotes from various media taken out of context. i decided to do this for a while, maybe a few weeks, because aesthetic blogs and the aesthetic style of blogging allow me to pool and channel my energies towards larger and more ambitious styles of writing. i usually get loaded on caffeine during this process and frequently watch large amounts of anime and meditate some. its definitely a process and its geared toward something hazily, vaguely spiritual but with pretentions toward being authentically publishable as theory. the idea also being i would like to make some money to support my livelihood, and i like to write, and am somewhat skilled at it, or at least experienced in kind of a ramshackle homespun sort of way. so if my social media presence is pretty boring and kind of weirdly nostalgic or else contrariwise if you feel it has improved lately thats the reason why that happened.

ive been getting very hazy and foggy mentally lately. i feel like it has to do with caffeination and lack of sleep. its important to get everything flowing properly, and sometimes depression and anxiety make that difficult to do. theres anxiety over unemployment, something im trying to remedy, and theres anxiety over theory and where to proceed next via theory. for years i was a devout buddhist in some ways, and meditated a lot, almost every day. i prayed to the bodhisattvas and copped to buddhist metaphysics, something which, based around personal life experience, i had every reason to believe was true. lately and in my own, strange way, ive begun to question this ideology and interpret it as part of a patchwork of ideologies, each one which attempts to describe a totality, a totality which is rarely if ever described properly by any ideology. grasping at straws in a structural sense, and feeling nonplussed but with no ground to run to, and im back on the boss level in super mario 64 where bowser smashes the ground to make it fall away. attempts at restructuring as this dissolution transpires only serve to create new protocols equal in scope to pre-existing paradigms. and there are plenty of people who dont struggle this much with religion and probably still go to heaven, or think theyre going to heaven, or something. hows marge and the kids. did jerry get that new promotion. mom just got back from vacation in cancun. smalltalk style concerns arising in every day transitionary speech feel distinct and very distant from these kind of hazy, pie in the sky questions. plato never wrote about the kind of stuff you see in a cheers episode. there are philosophy books that try to merge the two, but they usually get shelved in the comedy section.

so its mostly a matter of trying to absorb and contain new information, which abides in abundance, and trying to corral it into sort of a pointing arrow to direct me where to go, in my hewing, a feat not easily done. probably the endgame is in the crafting and solution of art, but what kind of art, and whether i have the tools at my disposal to even create it, is less easily answered. so for now, i guess, im absorbing, waiting, asking questions, and who knows, and who can say.

earliest memories of religion are of the greco roman religion and not knowing about the mystery religious rites but knowing about an abstract concept of wisdom and the ocean and extrapolating the existence of athena and poseidon in that way. later i have memories of exposure to christianity and buddhism and bahai but none of these things feel particularly useful to me at this time in my life. i can more readily receive a picture, a kind of enlarged image, of a broad religious landscape and some of the questions it attempts to provide answers for, or at least, a way of thinking about. the greco roman religion, for instance, is a presentation of a deleuzian multiplicity, and the monotheistic religions are a monad, but i also dont think either of these things can say the other is inherently undesireable. tolerance seems to be the best method, but also, and likewise, not dwelling specifically in any of them. acknowledging they all exist, but not being any of them. enjoying in surfeit the tension between multiplicity and monad. that there can be many things and one thing. like the album cover of dark side of the moon.

[incendir]

[NOTE]: I used a combination of bbintl and beesubs translations so credit to both of them

I don’t understand the eyes that focus on you I don’t understand the things you hold now, at that age Your passionate fans, the TV programs that allow you to be on them The musicians that form around you

One of the most common hate comments—that they claim they just don’t understand why he’s so successful, they don’t get what the hype about him is, they don’t get why he’s so famous at such a young age, and they say all this with the tone that he can’t possibly deserve any of it. He can’t possibly deserve or have done anything worthy of all the fans he has, the renown artists he’s collaborated with, all the shows he’s been on (I’m assuming the most representative of this is him being a producer on Show Me The Money—when he was first cast on the fourth season there was plenty of debate as to whether he deserved that position when all of his peers in his age group and in terms of years debuted were still competitors themselves).

There’s no real incentive, no reason for my hate But my guilty conscience gets buried by the crowd

As his fan of over six years now, I’ll be the first to say he’s done plenty to warrant criticism—you’d be hard-pressed to find any human, any celebrity, who hasn’t. He’s never committed a crime, he’s never done anything morally, hugely questionable or controversial—I don’t consider dating a scandal, so the only true scandal I believe he’s ever had stems from an immature, and thoughtless mistake that he’s atoned for and apologized for over and over, and still does years after it even happened. There is no reason that I can think of to hate him, and if you read between the lines of the comments of his anti-fans, you’ll realize that there’s no true reason for them to hate him either. Yet, he has hordes and hordes of haters because when spiteful comment after spiteful comment is read by otherwise neutral parties, more hate tends to easily form—if so many people hate him there must be a reason, right? Strength in numbers applies to the negative as well as the positive.

No matter what efforts you made, what suffering you went through Your success gave you the right to be insulted again

He was born with heart and respiratory problems. These health issues made it difficult for him during Block B’s early days when they had taxing choreography and he was always seen gasping for breath after rehearsals and performances. The first company he signed with treated him and his group terribly. There were controversies and they were extremely unpopular—they were horribly managed and in dire financial circumstances. They managed to escape, they managed to claw their way up through blood and sweat to the top despite their new company still being incompetent. He sacrifices sleep and personal time to create music for both himself and his group—he never once considered one without the other. He constantly receives hate and constantly has the general image of a thuggish troublemaker despite being well-spoken, well-read, intelligent, humble, and kind. But it doesn’t matter how much he endured because he’s successful now, isn’t he? None of that matters, none of it needs to be taken into account because now, he’s rich, he lives in an expensive apartment, wears expensive clothes, has an expensive car—so he’s perfectly qualified to be hated on. It doesn’t matter what he had to do to get to this point in his life, the fact of the matter is that he’s here, and that, apparently, gives everyone the right to take a stab at him all over again.

Why did she date such an unrefined delinquent?

Nine times out of ten, when there is a dating scandal, the vast majority of comments will hate on the woman in the relationship, whether she is a celebrity or non-celebrity even. Naturally, even though one of the articles mentioned how he had helped her through her own controversy, how he’d driven to her company and comforted her, this became the one time that I saw more comments hating on the man—that he wasn’t treating her right, that he didn’t deserve her, that he was too ugly for her, that her seen running into his apartment complex was a reflection of him rather than of the paparazzi following them, that he was a player who couldn’t possibly have feelings for her other than for a physical relationship because that just seems like the type of man he is.

I don’t understand how your music became hits The awards you receive every year, your luxurious surroundings

Paralleling the beginning of the first verse, and an elaboration on it as well—again one of the most common hate comments. Through this, you can see the shape and form of the song—the structure of how he’s stacking the different kinds of hate he receives. The beginning of the first two verses both begin with the most basic and transparent attempts—invalidating his success and worth by stating that they themselves don’t see anything special about him, that his music, his entire career, seems pretty unremarkable to them, nothing noteworthy and definitely undeserving of the accolades he has received thus far.

If you evoke some controversy right now, that would be impeccable timing My lips are twitching with abusive words and insults Our needs are simple, you just have to mess up on one sentence The interpretation is entirely up to me and I decide on your ideology as well

As each verse progresses, the hatred progresses as well—at first they are perhaps the type of comments he could shrug off easily because they are so obviously false or ones that are simply about his profession, and he is the type of person that accepts criticism for his music, not the type to ever think his music is flawless. Deeper into the song are the lyrics detailing the comments that are harder to stop reading—that are harder to shrug off and dismiss, that attack the type of person he is or the type of person they think he is and want him to become so that they can be proven right all along. All it would take is one mistake, anything that can be even mildly misconstrued—that would be more than enough to paint him as the brutish, stupid, arrogant, undeserving celebrity they knew he was all along. Clarifications, explanations, elaborations are all excuses—it will never matter what he meant, only what they hear, what they want to hear.

A hundred of your good acts, I’ll carve on sand One mistake, on solid rock

It doesn’t matter how long he atones for one sin—it doesn’t matter how long he goes until his next, inevitable mistake. It doesn’t matter that he’s only human. For all the hundreds of things he does right, for all the years he goes without controversy, they’ll carve them onto sand for the tide to wash away moments later as if they never happened. Any mistake he makes, however, regardless of how small, regardless if resolved or proven false in the end, regardless if apologized and forgiven, that’ll be engraved for all eternity—it’ll be brought back again and again any time his name is mentioned.

Guess whose loss it will be if you become my enemy? The camera lens will become a gun barrel

Above all, faceless IDs on the Internet full of hatred yet basking in their anonymity want to know and feel that they have an actual effect. They want to know that their words shake him and they want him to know that they are what determine his fate, his success or lack thereof—that they are so powerful they determine his self-esteem, his sense of self-worth, his pride or shame at the quality of his music. As long as he steps in front of the camera, it is up to them how he feels about himself and his work—therefore, he should do well to please them, remain on their good side. This will return in fuller force later on in the song.

No matter how shitty things are for you, you need to dance properly

A good proportion of the lyrics are applicable to celebrities in general, most especially idols, and this is one of them. I’m of the personal opinion that professionalism should be maintained—a job is a job, and rain or shine, you have to do your job if you expect to receive your livelihood from it. However, in the end, we’re all humans, and there are days you just can’t contain what is going wrong in your life, sometimes you’re sick, sometimes you just aren’t feeling it, and I’m not, and I don’t believe he is either, referring to those who simply skimp out as if being an idol is a voluntary activity at will rather than a profession—as he’s someone who is extremely professional and rarely, if ever, misses a schedule (he’s been known to endure filmings while vomiting between takes). I believe he’s referring to how the majority of idols and celebrities in general are hard-working, maintain appropriate expressions, perform to their fullest ability nearly all of the time, but they are crucified all the same any one single day or event they don’t seem at the peak of cheerfulness, at the height of their energy and enthusiasm.

I’m not an anti, it’s fan mail Once you rack up those positive comments That means you’re past your prime

This is the first time in the verses he refers to the chorus, and the central motif of the entire song: The opposite of love is not hate—it is indifference. This anti states, and this will be emphasized later on, that Zico should be grateful for this negativity. He should be grateful for the hate. In fact, he should even consider these hate comments fan mail—the reason being, that, receiving positive comments means he is no longer relevant.

Bear this in mind, the moment you make a stage name You have to kill yourself

A chilling, impactful line about the sacrifices that celebrities make physically, emotionally, mentally that non-celebrities will never be able to truly know, and never can truly experience nor understand. He had to sacrifice as much as he gained, and it wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that he had to kill a part of Woo Jiho to become Zico. It should also be noted that he changes his flow for this verse—so that it almost sounds less like a third verse and more like a bridge. Previously, both his flow and tone were dark and smooth, but now it becomes harsher and choppier, aggressive and angry. The anti is becoming more and more cynical with its words—to the point where there’s hardly any other way to describe it than just, honestly, truly cruel.

The choice is yours to make If you want the public to eat you up (popularity/relevance), then be chewed out first Get on the cutting board

Leading in straight from the previous line, and also referring back to what was mentioned previously about indifference being the true opposite of love, the anti reiterates that the only way to gain fame is to first allow himself to be destroyed. His character, his skills, his appearance—he needs to accept that everything must be put willingly for slaughter and slander before he can gain fame because any attention is supposedly good attention and he has to accept that.

(1) A pro always rips the corners of his mouth widely (2) Professionals always need to smile

I thought this was one of those instances where both the figurative meaning and the literal translation are needed to get the full effect across. The meaning is another elaboration of the previous line regarding how celebrities are expected to “dance” even when they are going through difficult times personally, but the literal translation gives this statement the grotesque, macabre tone it needs to fully convey what he wishes to have the listener realize—it may seem nothing to an audience, to a non-celebrity, to an anonymous anti-fan on the Internet to tell a celebrity they need to perk up and keep smiling for a professional demeanor. After all, the commenter comments once—but there are thousands of commenters commenting once and the celebrity receives all of those thousands telling them to smile, again and again and again throughout their career. After a while, it wouldn’t be surprising if the simple act of smiling when told to feels as if you are ripping the corners of your mouth.

Merchandise don’t have privacy The customer is king around here

Possibly one of my favorite lines of the entire song. Other than the obvious of how this is referring to how entitled many non-celebrities feel they are to the private lives of celebrities, it most likely also references part of a rap he did during the NIKE Unlimited event shortly following the revealing of his relationship last year—

There’s another thing I could never forget That day my house, my car, and my daily life were all exposed

The reception to this was, expectedly, simply more hate—violent indignation that he was defending the invasion of his privacy and most comments ignored how his privacy was invaded at all and rather stated that it wouldn’t matter if his privacy was invaded if he was an upright person with nothing to hide, so clean and moral that even if snapshots were taken wildly out of context, he would still seem moral and upright. Bringing this back to ANTI, with the furious tone and choppy flow he uses for this verse, especially at this part, you can sense the undercurrent of sarcasm. The anti-fan finds it so incredibly absurd and infuriating that a product dares to desire privacy, that a product dares to desire its human rights not to be violated when everyone knows the customer is always right.

Hatred is also interest How long do you think you’ll receive that kind of treatment? So be thankful to me

What was implied in the second verse is now explicitly stated. Zico’s anti-fan is letting him know that fame doesn’t last forever, and that hatred is also considered popularity and attention and, regardless of how much he has been hurt by it—regardless of how many wounds and moments of darkness and doubt it might have caused him, first and foremost, Zico should be grateful to those who’ve hated on him all these years, dragged his, his friends’, his family’s names through the dirt. For, without them, and when they no longer treat him so miserably, he will not be celebrated anymore—he will be no one, once again.

I’ll make you lose your way I hope I can see you around for a long time I’ll end it here

As said before, again, above all the utmost wish and desire of an anti is to know that the subject of hatred has been affected—feels lost and horrible and feels hated, feels like truly all the faults listed about them are true. They want to know they’ve made Zico question whether he even wants to pursue his dream anymore. At the same time, they wouldn’t be an anti-fan if they had no one to hate. They rant on and on about how their hatred is a necessity of the celebrity livelihood, that Zico should be grateful as it is their attention that brings his music popularity and thusly lines his pockets—that he is nothing without them. Yet, they need him—they want him to continue making music for them to dismiss as mediocre and unoriginal, they want him to continue giving interviews so they can dissect his answers and dismiss him as problematic and toxic, they want him to continue being on shows and featured in magazines so they can claim his personality arrogant and his appearance ugly. The tone is sarcastic, cold, and mean. Naturally, the last thing they would ever want to do is let him know that without him they have no choice than to face what it reflects about themselves that they take the time to think up and spit out such degrading things to someone who has committed no crimes in his entire life and no true controversy in years. The very last line of this verse carries more weight than appears—stating that they will stop slandering him now as if they are doing him a favor. They are implying that they are taking pity on him now—he must be so destroyed, must be shaken and reeling, from all the faults he has that they’ve shed light on. So, for his sake, they’ll stop, and they challenge him to continue appearing before them if he can handle it.

I’ll wipe away your make-up And tell the world that it was all an act Why do I hate you? The price you’ll pay will be as large as the success you enjoy That’s all I wanna tell you about

I have the lyrics of the chorus as last because they summarize what the anti is saying throughout all of the different types of comments they leave. There is a reason for why these are the lyrics that G.Soul sings. Zico’s voice is what the anti-fans are actually posting, what they are actually themselves typing out and what they believe they mean. G.Soul is speaking for what is within the anti-fan themselves, what they are feeling and why they do what they do even if they might not acknowledge it themselves. Words differ from one hate comment to the next, but the sentiment behind them will always be the same—the one thing that no anti-fan will ever be seen typing in, the thing that Zico has realized about all of his anti-fans. He said as much in the Dazed Digital interview earlier this year, “Nowadays, there are people and comments trying to bring me down.When I see stuff like that, I find myself laughing about it—I don’t understand it, there’s no point to it. How can someone lack that much confidence about themselves that they try to get me down? I mean I don’t even think I’m that great!”

Anti-fans disguise themselves as concerned fans, as critics, as neutral third parties with an unbiased opinion that is only vitriolic and cruel because the celebrity clearly must deserve it. Despite all the different masks, all the various categories of hate-filled messages, that an anti might wear, Zico has realized that what they want is the same—for whatever reason, they want him to hate himself as much as they hate him. They want to see himself as the trouble-causing, simple-minded, partying, problematic, arrogant, selfish, unworthy, overrated celebrity that they paint him out to be and that they are so focused on getting the world to see him as.

I’m not you ANTI

There are several ways to look at the very last line of the song. Initially, I thought it was most probably just an English error on his part, and he meant it as “I’m not your anti”. In that case, the meaning is simple, and the final line simply reiterates the motif previously elaborated on and reiterated throughout the song about how hatred is still interest. The second way this line could be taken, if there is no error in it, is the anti-fan stating that they are not Zico—simply they do not want to be Zico, they are above him for all of the reasons they state throughout the song, all of his controversies and how problematic his image is according to them. In this interpretation, the repeated “anti” at the end would just be a sort of tie-in to state the song title. The final interpretation I offer, and I personally go back and forth between this and the first one, is that this final line is actually from Zico’s perspective—the only part of the entire song that is not supposedly spoken by the anti-fan. If spoken by Zico, this line then turns into “I’m not you, Anti”. It doesn’t matter how much they hate him, how many times and how intensely they degrade him and his loved ones, how much the rip apart his music and claim it insubstantial and unoriginal at best. He’ll never hate himself the way that they seem to hate themselves.