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absolutebl · 1 year ago

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Okay, FINE, the shows you should watch for BL's QUEER AF roots

You ready to go hunting?

Many of these are difficult to find. Also many of the images of them and their posters have been block/banned by tumblr, so, no screen grabs for you! (Good times.)

I don't necessarily *like* any of these, but if you are queer and in this fandom and need to dialogue around BL's queerness - these are going to provide a foundation for you. They are important for various industry, reputation, directorial, and cultural reasons. As seeds often are.

Trigger warnings throughout.

The true beginnings:

Boys Love, Japan's 2006 movie is a REALLY rough start featuring a journalist + hot model = murder gay, mild necrophilia, cheating, abuse, rape, and suicide for love. Start as you mean to go on, why don't you, Japan? Is it queer... maybe? Is it BL... honey, I am very sorry to inform you, this started BL.

Note: Yoshikazu Kotani is famous in og BL circles since he acted in 3 early BLs, both Boys Loves and then Same Difference. Also he v tall and hawt.

Eternal Summer, Taiwan 2006 - unlike Japan, Taiwan did NOT start how it would, eventually, go on. But what a messy way to start. A high school story of 3 besties in a love triangle, self discovery, and sexual awakening that fucks it all up.

No Regret, Korea 2006, is a very unhinged queer catastrophe piece about a lost gay man who ends up a host and then almost a murderer because of both his job and his identity.

Note: This is the directorial feature film debut of Lee-Song Hee-il Korea's (so far as I know) first openly gay director who specialized (to this day) in queer content.

The Love of Siam, Thailand 2007, this was Thailand's queer awakening, sure they would backpedal for YEARS after, but in 2022 they began to remember what this movie was (and did) and overtly referenced this quiet little masterpiece. This movie is sad but stunning in that way that the best queer works from Thailand can be (like Present Perfect or ITSAY.) It has Thailand's quintessential softness around theme and character, which you'll understand perfectly when highlighted against the backdrop of the early 2000s works from Japan, Korea, and Taiwan. Thailand will never lose this soft style and it's one of the most attractive qualities of Thai BL: it's never very harsh with us or its characters. This movie very easily COULD have been quite harsh indeed.

I thought long and hard about including Rice Rhapsody AKA Hainan Chicken Rice (Hainan ji fan) on this list and finally decided it doesn't really qualify. Still let me mention Hong Kong's 2005 movie. It is amazing, fascinating, and very rough going for an ostensible comedy. It wasn't the actual beginning because few saw it and Hong Kong never really picked up or ran with BL let alone QL, but it was hella queer. It's also hella homophobic.

Just Friends? (2009 Korea) - this is Korea's first (kinda) upbeat version of a BL featuring already established boyfriends, one of whom is on military leave, trying to decide on coming out, family life, and the future. All of these are themes Korea will pretty much never tackle again, retreating as they would to their bubble. But what a fun little offering this little show was and is to this day. You should watch it.

Like Love 1 AKA I Love You As A Man: Part 1 - China's 2014 offering is actually pretty classic early form live action yaoi with things like whipping boy, a university setting, rich/poor jock/nerd pairing, hard grumpy/sunshine and a very odd title. It's pre-censorship with an HEA, also explicit, yeah China once did that. This is a lot less queer that it is classic BL and classic Chinese romance, neither of which have any kind of connection to reality. But hey, that's what I'm here for. But it's important to note the drifting away from queerness beginning to occur.

Love Sick - Thailand's 2014 "boys in blues shorts" high school set soapy (in all ways) offering is widely considered the true beginning of Thai BL and by default, eventually, BL as we know it today. (As the biggest producer they somewhat dictate taste and trends in the genre.) This is one of those BLs that owes almost nothing to yaoi, although it started a number of tropes that are now endemic to Thai BL. What it is, instead, is a well scripted story of bisexual self-discovery and the inherent chaos of loving someone of the same gender for the first time, all wrapped up in hormones, existing relationships, and communication issues. It is high school queer angst at its messiest. Nothing is going to be easy for these boys because queer isn’t easy but also because life isn’t easy… welcome to adulthood sweethearts. Is is overtly queer? For 2014 Thailand? Sure is.

Love Next Door 2 a movie from 2014 and one of Thailand’s early very high heat pieces, it’s odd, but sexy I guess? Some unexpectedly decent queer rep including femme characters getting screen time + HEAs. (Part one from 2013 has the same high heat content and features the same lead character (and actor) discovering he is gay with the sex worker next door, but isn't as good nor is it relevant to this installment.)

A few other unknowns, for the queer babies

Wait For Me at Udagawachou AKA Udagawachou de Matteteyo - from Japan in 2015, this is a story about two boys in high school one of whom is a repressed outsider and the other who has a terrible secret (body dysmorphia & cross dressing). When the first boy discovers what's up with the second one, his reaction is very much fetishization. "Oh Japan must you?" kinda started for me with this show. But in this case, Japan, weirdly MUST. This is the ONLY show laboring under (and testing) a pointedly straight lens (or is it?) and identity examination (yes but which boys' identity? that's the question) that I've EVER seen even edge into the BL genre. It is crazy queer, even as it mostly focuses on the fetishization of identity from an outsider's perspective. I WISH more people in fandom would watch it so I could at least talk to someone about it.

The Lover (BL Cut) Korea's 2015 series had multiple couples in an apartment complex, one pair of whom is a BL romance between a Korean man and a visiting Japanese tourist (played by a Kpop idol). It's comedic, slapstick sexy only (no kissing), but basically starts up Korea's bubble and use of idols in BL. It's kinda fascinating to watch them dodge around and still represent gayness in what (is sadly destined to become) a very Chinese way, but which Korea in pursuit of Hallyu and market share would morph into the bubble.

Mr. X and I from China in 2015 is a compilation piece and, I think, the first of this kind of multiple narrative shorter grab bags AKA "Sampler Pack BL." Two of the stories are very queerly sad, but the third is CLASSIC BL of the kind that would become China's best (and last) true BL, Addicted.

Sweet Boy, (Thai 2016) Chimon's first gay role and it is quite sad, oddly sexy, and similar to Dew the movie or My Bromance (just so you know what you are in for) but the acting is on point. When Thailand goes dark, this is how they do it, but this is rough going for baby queers because that's the darkness it is exploring. Our old thematic friends: the pain of self discovery and coming out into a homophobic environment and unfriendly reality, and the cost of being the one able (and willing) to stay in the closet.

Method (Korea 2017) this movie is a May/December actor/idol pairing, that should have been everything I wanted in life but is more about the older character cheating on his wife and their weird “artsy” relationship and frankly, I hated it. And I don’t say that lightly. Is it queer? Who tf knows, but is sure has some interesting things to say about the nature of PERFORMATIVE queerness.

Red Balloon is Taiwan's 2017 precursor BL to their biggest and most famous prestige piece Your Name Engraved Herein. If you're making a choice, choose that instead, but this series certainly paved the way for it to come into existence. Both shows tackle the pressures of culture and social structures on self acceptance and identity and the loneliness inevitably caused by conflict between the two.

(As indeed does Life Love On The Line, Present Perfect, Grey Rainbow, Tropical Night, My Sky, and many other queer meets early BL pieces that revolved around coming out and family acceptance.)

China's 3 2017 "they tried to censor the gay... and it went HORRIBLY wrong":

Beloved Enemy,

The Fairy Fox,

Mr. CEO is Falling in Love with Him.

Honestly these 3 are basically the uncanny valley of BLs.

The Novelist AKA The Pornographer series (2018-2020). Messy psychological machinations, gaslighting, fetishization, sexual corruption, and more good times from "well, what did you expect?" Japan, but also no holds barred queer, just well and truly fucked in the head (and arse) about it.

The Cornered Mouse Dreams of Cheese AKA Kyuso wa Chizu no Yume wo Miru (Japan 2020) - Drama llama queers so queer and so dramatic it's like Japan is trying to PROVE something: obsession, cheating, break-up, reunion, then break up again, all of it explicit. This show is just SO JAPANESE. I can't even, but you should watch it and you'll know exactly what I mean. Something like My Personal Weatherman owes it's lineage to this kind of BL. If you like Japan naked, boney, emo, and smoking (hot & ciggy) you will love this, and should watch it. It's objectively amazing, I can't stand it, but I NEED people to talk about it more.

More Queer Stuff about BL from moi

BL Linguistics & Queer Identity - I Am Gay versus I Like Men

Will BL Get More Honestly Queer?

Actually gay, not BL gay - the idea of “by queers, for queers, about queers,” the BL bubble, sanitized gay, and a queer lens

Queer lens (from the director) and chemistry (from the actors) in BL (A Tale of Thousand Stars)

Touch & Daisy in Secret Crush On You - Queer Coded Language and 3rd Gender Identity

BL in Taiwan & Gay Marriage

Debating Queerbaiting in BL ( + Devil Judge… is it queerbaiting?)

BL Actors and the Assumption of Queerness - outing actors, coming out, being out, more: Is that BL actor actually queer?

So is it really fetishization? straight women loving bl

Some BL fans are sasaengs, and it’s a problem in this fandom

BLs That Highlight How Society Treats Queers

10 BLs That Are Honest to a Queer Experience

If you like these kinds of shows try the "Moody Arthouse Smackdoodle" section of this post too.

Happy watching!

(source)

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tbhimnoteasyonmyself · 7 months ago

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Rak's Cartier Bracelets - EPISODES 1 TO 5

Hello, Tumblr. Today I hope not to be simply another Tumblrina with opinions but also a neurodivergent Tumblrina with hyperspecific interests and life history that come in handy for this particular purpose.

What interests and what history, you ask? Ah, but, of course! My deep knowledge of the Cartier Love Collection from, obviously, being a HunHan conspirationist in 2014 at the ripe age of 12.

Now, if I've satisfied your curiosity, let us begin.

So I was watching episode 5 today (don't blame me, I wanted to watch it sooner but I was on vacation bc my sister gave me a trip to Sevilla as a birthday gift) and one thing caught my attention during the argument scene.

That bad boy I very carefully (not really) identified for you is one of the most iconic Cartier products ever: A Love Bracelet™.

"Ok. Cool. But why does that matter?"

Well, for once it proves Rak is rich as fuck. Those bracelets go for THOUSANDS of euro. Like... The cheapest bracelet in the Love Collection is the intertwined rings bracelet in gold and rose gold (the white gold one is more expensive)

And it sells rn for 2120€ (2300$).

And that's for sure NOT the version Rak has!

From what I can tell, he's wearing this version:

Which is the classic Love Bracelet design in white gold.

This one is selling rn for 8750€ (9490$).

I think there can be an argument that he's actually wearing either the brushed version (left photo) or the small version (right photo)

which, respectively, are being sold for 8750€ (9490$) and 5650€ (6121$) but I think the version Rak has is

too shiny to be the brushed version;

too thick to be the small version.

Either way, it's a fucking expensive bracelet.

But this is not even why I wanted to point this out, I mean, yeah, of course Rak is rich, we are all well-aware of that.

The point here is that this bracelet is not just famous for being pretty (which, as far as my judgement goes, it really isn't, sorry not sorry). It is famous, more than anything else, bc of its meaning, which I'll let the brand tell you all about:

Which is why it caught my attention that Rak, of all people, is wearing one of these. Like... What the hell does this mean???

So I decided to investigate when did this bracelet first appear in order to have a feel whether or not this could potentially be plot-relevant, a character descriptor or simply a fashion choice. And what I found, my dear friends, is that this bracelet first appeared right at the beginning of ep.4.

Which is very suspicious because ep.3, we all recall, ended with Rak promising Mut that he'd stay on the island for a bit more.

BUT, before we start jumping to conclusions, I decided to check whether this bracelet stands the trial of ep.5 and remains until the very end which, big and revelant surprise, it does NOT.

It gets replaced, in the scene of the day after the fight by this one:

Which, I get it, it might be hard to see and identify but it's actually an old friend. In fact, it's the only other bracelet Rak has ever worn:

This has been on his wrist from the beginning of ep.1 to the end of ep.3 (excluding times when Rak was showering, sleeping or doing other activities where having a metal bracelet in the shape of a sharp nail would be impractical). And, would you look at that, if it isn't indeed: another Cartier bracelet. This time, a Juste Un Clou Collection bracelet.

Now, Juste Un Clou (literally Just a Nail), which is also fucking expensive (9500€ - 10292$ for the model he is wearing) has a bit of a different concept than Love, which is:

So what does it mean?

Well, there are some options but I'll tell you what I think makes the most sense:

Throughout the first episodes we see Rak being this person who's different from everyone else on the island. He's from the city, he's rich, he has a desk job, he even looks different from the people in the island, from what Muk says! (which, I get it, it's colourist and has it own set of issues and I don't love it at all but hey, I don't make canon, I just comment on it, so that's what we got and that's what I'll be doing)

He's also independent, he has his own money, pays for his own stuff, doesn't rely on other people. He wants to do everything alone, without Mut, even when it makes his life harder, when it's impractical, when it would be better to have help.

He also tries to be fearless, put on a front. He argues with Mut, wants to cast a shadow way bigger than himself to assert his place, wants to seem untouchable, like nothing could bring him down. We know, of course, it's not true, both us as the audience and Mut learn that through prolongued contact with Rak and exposure to his weaknesses and traumas but he still tries to uphold that image.

And, of course, he tries to be free in the sense that he tries not to create emotional attachments. ESPECIALLY not to Mut. Because he doesn't believe in love and doesn't think he can fall in love and he tries so, so hard not to let himself want and need people, he likes to act like he has no strings attached, like he can go about the world without thinking of anyone that gives sense to the word "home".

So, by making Rak wear this bracelet, what the show is telling us is essentially who Rak is or who he tries to be. These are the values that Rak upholds. In this sense, the Juste Un Clou bracelet is a character descriptor.

HOWEVER, after the most vulnerable, most beautiful post sex conversation in the history of Thai BL, Rak begins wearing the Love Bracelet. And this indicates a shift.

Now, the shift is not so much a change in Rak's personality (although there is some, he's been slowly changing since ep.1) but rather in what the narrative wants us to know now. Because, by now, we know Rak. We can discern all these characteristics, we don't need the bracelet as an identifier. What we need, rather, is to know that Rak means what he told Mut. Because he feels it.

See, contrary to the Juste Un Clou bracelet which is a bit more remarkable because of its unusual shape, the Love Bracelet seems fairly common, especially if you're not staring at Peat's people's dainty wrists. So you, much like the people around Mut and Rak, could miss the way in which Rak cares for Mut, because that love is unconventional, not bound by those traditional ways in which people demonstrate that sort of feeling (like Mut does, for example). Some could say... Free-spirited. Or, as well, because Rak himself is trying his hardest not to take note of it, burying it away and dismissing it. To no avail, however, because it is still there, as all of us can see (just like the bracelet). And, by the looks of it, will be locked there forever.

"Okay, Dante, but then why does Rak go back to the other bracelet? Is he no longer in love?"

Please have object permanence, darling, not all that exists can be seen at all times. Kkdkddjsjsks /j

Or, in other words: no, that's not it.

What it is, though, is that the narrative, once again, wants us to focus on other stuff.

As Mut tells Rak this episode (ep.5, for those in the future), he's been away, doing other stuff, buried in work... He's been complying to his duties and going back to the bad habits that cast a shadow over Rak's personality and who he really is, what he really wants.

So, that's why, when he chooses to indulge Mut and pay attention to him on his own (unlike what happens earlier in the episode, where Mut has to ask for this attention), he is back to wearing the Juste Un Clou bracelet. He's showing his colours again, of that independent person who's not just another city guy in the city but special in his own way.

It also serves to show us the subtle ways in which Rak is chaging. That free quality, for example, is slowly starting to mean not free from attachments but rather free from the chains of the trauma that is holding Rak back from forming and indulging in those attachments.

And, to top it all off, I have one smaller notice to add which is refering to the colour of the bracelets.

Now, for those who aren't familiar with jewelry metal, white gold is not white, it's silverish. And I say silverish because I mean exactly that: it is NOT silver, it's silverish. It still retains a warmish yellow undertone to it.

But I know, if you have a good eye, you can tell neither of the bracelets I showed you have a warmish yellow undertone to it. Good spot! That is because Cartier's bracelets have something that is actually pretty common: a rhodium-finish. This is what makes them so silver. And precisely why I think the colour matters.

You see... To the average person, who has no idea about Cartier bracelts and whatnot, both the bracelets might seem like a common metal bracelet. Not very valuable. And yet, they are white gold and worth a considerable amount of money.

If we translate that into the meanings I just explained, that would mean that people see Rak, this brat, spoiled, cold man and think him annoying, heartless, not worth their time. Same as I explained with Rak's kind of love: weak, barely even there, not real. Or even, if you want to interpret the Love Bracelet as a representation of Mut himself, then him as well. Judged as a simple person, boring, with nothing to offer but that is actually worth a lot. At least to Rak, who bought both the bracelet and Mut.

SO, what are the conclusions? Well...

Rak is FUCKING LOADED (and if he wants to provide for me as well, I'd gladly accept the offer, thank you);

Rak is an extremely complex character who's secrets are very much fun to uncover;

This series pays a lot of attention to small details and I love it for it!

And that's it.

It was a long post, I know so I'm sorry but I had to share my thoughts sdjkdjdkdjskdj

I'll keep an eye on this for the next episodes and if I have anything to add I'll let you guys know.

Also if you wanna add to this discussion feel free to, I'd love to hear it!!

All the love!! 💜💜💜

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jacqueline-p-rose · 2 months ago

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In this year I finally ditched Spotify for good in favour of rebuilding my music library offline and, since May, I have been collecting again the music that was lost to time in the great iPod crash of 2016. 98% of the music I listen to now are mp3s on my phone (using the Poweramp app), and most of those songs are ripped from CDs bought cheaply and secondhandly from eBay. I feel that I listen to music differently from the yoothes in that I put on an entire album and listen to it through, so in light of the recent flight from Spotify in hand with my unsuppressed FOMO, I've decided to give you my top ten albums of 2024. So hear, my Not-ify Wrapped 2024!

1 - Antemasque - Antemasque

This is the real reason it's a list of top ten albums and not top ten songs, because the top 12 most played songs on my list are the 12 songs on this album. It's great, not only my favourite album of (2014) 2024, but one of my favourite of all time. I wrote a little more about why here if you're feeling read-y.

2 - London Grammar - If You Wait

A classic of a specifically difficult time in my life, brought back into another increasingly difficult time of my life. "Interlude" specifically gets to me and makes me cry, and you KNOW how I love to cry!

3 - Soundgarden - Superunknown

When I first heard Soundgarden as a pre-teen I remember thinking it was a bit too heavy for me, like... Too metal. It's taken being in my 30s to finally appreciate this bad boy. I don't know what I was thinking back then, maybe I was as soft as un-moulded jelly, but it's now one of my favourite albums of all time.

4 - Le Butcherettes - Sin Sin Sin

A prize for accepting the challenge of trying new things. I love how perfectly this slots in alongside The Dead Weather, while being far more interesting. Beautiful, beautiful, wonderful thing to come into my life.

5 - Boys Next Door - Door Door

Nick Cave was a better father to me than my real father. This album (along with Henry's Dream with the Black Seeds) I have plucked from the nostalgia of dads cigarette-ridden Pajero and claimed as my own. I hope my children have a more positive memory of it in future.

6 - Made Out Of Babies - The Ruiner

Made Out Of Babies is my answer if someone were to ask me what my favourite band is, so it's a little surprising to me to see it so low down on the list, although it's really an even match for play count with most of the other stuff on this list. The Ruiner and Trophy are a fantastic extrapolation of 90's grunge into the new millennia. Coward I don't like so much, maybe I'll appreciate it the same one day, but it is not today.

7 - Warpaint - Warpaint/Exquisite Corpse/The Fool

Really it's only Warpaint that is this high on the list, but I'm including the other two because I often play them all in a row. These are very new purchases to be on the list at all, but my partner likes it so I can get away with playing it during the day. Drone-pop my beloved.

8 - Spectacular Spectacular - Blur

This album is always left off those lists of trans musicians that get shared about tumblr, which is a shame. It's not screamy punk or noisy synth so maybe it gets overlooked amongst the GLOSS and HERS and Against Me! types, but there are other trans experiences and expressions, and this is one. Beautiful and heartfelt, a must listen when I'm sad about boys (which is often).

9 - Audioslave - Audioslave

Though often thought of by the cool kids as less than the sum of its parts, I really dig Audioslave. Just because it plays on the radio doesn't mean you can't enjoy it too, loose your grip on ego and enjoy yourself, I know I am.

10 - Portishead - Portishead/Dummy

Some guy I used to work with put on Portishead one day and was crestfallen when I said "I used to cry to this as a lovesick teenager." He clearly thought he had found something super obscure and was proud of himself for showing it off. Serves him right for playing "Sour Times" the day after I broke up with my girlfriend.

Honourary mention - Adam And The Ants - Kings Of The Wild Frontier

The reason I say 98% of my music is offline is because I listen to Adam Ant a lot on Youtube. This album seems impossible to find as a CD for some reason, even though it was reissued in 2004. It's on Spotify, but I've been struggling to find a copy of it off the streams, so while it's not in my top 10 from Poweramp, it is top 10 in my heart.

So there you have it, my top 10 albums of 2024. There are at least another five albums I would have thought would be on this list and aren't, but I guess the stats don't lie. In an era where Spotify doesn't pay artists unless they get over 1000 listens, and even then their cut is split with the giants till it's almost nothing, I think there's no better time to cut the umbilical to constant access and be more intentional about the music we listen to and the artists we support. I buy digital albums from Bandcamp when I can, but even when I'm buying old CDs at least I'm actually getting something for my $15 a month. The wait for them to arrive in the mail and the space they take up means that I have to be very deliberate about what music I enjoy and will actively choose to listen to, and that makes me enjoy them more. Sitting with the album cover reading through the booklet as it rips onto my hard drive and plays in the background is very grounding, in a way it gives me confidence in other life decisions, it's small practice in making choices and expressing intention, and being rewarded for it. I highly recommend you to try this too, and maybe next year your wrapped will be music you have had a connection with and felt something about, and not just a bunch of songs you listened to without thinking.

#rose #spotify wrapped

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waitmyturtles · 2 years ago

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Turtles Catches Up With Old GMMTV: Together With Me/MaxTul Ship Edition

[What’s going on here? After joining Tumblr and discovering Thai BLs through KinnPorsche in 2022, I began watching GMMTV’s new offerings -- and realized that I had a lot of history to catch up on, to appreciate the more recent works that I was delving into. From tropes to BL frameworks, what we’re watching now hails from somewhere, and I’m learning about Thai BL's history through what I’m calling the Old GMMTV Challenge (OGMMTVC). Starting with recommendations from @absolutebl on their post regarding how GMMTV is correcting for its mistakes with its shows today, I’ve made an expansive list to get me through a condensed history of essential/classic/significant Thai BLs produced by GMMTV and many other BL studios. My watchlist, pasted below, lists what I’ve watched and what’s upcoming, along with the reviews I’ve written so far. I’ve covered Love Sick, SOTUS, and Make It Right so far, and today I offer my thoughts on Together With Me and the MaxTul ship. Thanks to @manogirl for your encouragement to add this to my watchlist!]

Okay! Together With Me. Well -- well, well, WELL.

First off: I’m VERY glad I added this drama to my list, and I want to give big ups again to @manogirl for being the loudest supporter of my adding this to the OGMMTVC and learning about the first high heat ship in Thai BLs. Secondly, I have to admit a mistake. I put Together With Me in-between the first and second seasons of Make It Right on my watchlist (pasted below), but I got the airing dates mixed up -- MIR2 aired before TwM, but I watched TwM first. Womp. I’ll fix my list below. (Thanks to @bengiyo for filling me in on important details about MIR2 so that I can make accurate comparisons in this piece!)

Even though I haven’t watched all of MIR2 yet, I can project from the early episodes what happens -- more heat, more chaos, more teenage angst. (MY DEAR CONFUSED FUSE. MY DEAR HEATY FRAMEBOOK.)

Nevertheless, TwM still provided some fabulous comparative material for me to understand where BL had gone from the time of 2014/2015 Love Sick to the 2017 moment of TwM’s airing.

2016 was a big year in Thailand, I now realize. SOTUS premieres as the first BL-BL -- the first show that was a BL, that focused solely on a main queer coupling. Then Make It Right airs, and it’s pulpy, wild, open, longing, full of implied teenage sex and direct communication about the befores, the durings, and the afters. Make It Right, as the dear @bengiyo stated, depicted a world in which teenage boys are able to explore queerness without being punished for it.

Then we get in 2017, and the second season of MIR2, which has more implied heat than the first season. AND THEN, THEN: we get Together With Me. And just, WOW -- did this show ever benefit from the road that Love Sick, SOTUS, and Make It Right/MIR2 paved.

Why?

One thing I wonder is: could we have EVER gotten two JACKED jocks like Max and Tul in a BL ship if LS/SOTUS/MIR/MIR2 had NOT aired before TwM?

I would actually love to entertain that as a question to the family that reads these posts. Because my own thinking is: no. I’m thinking that Captain and White walked so that Max and Tul could do it on camera run. They warmed up the censors to maybe relax a little. I would argue that the previous BLs and BL-inspired material gave MaxTul the safety, as two clearly masculine-presenting men -- stereotypically jacked, jocky, college-aged, huge, masculine, male-men -- to be the first big heat ship, as @manogirl stated, in Thai BL.

I think audiences were likely primed and ready, if they were following SOTUS (with no heat) and MIR/MIR2 (with high school-teenage heat), to GET some HEATY detail from some VERY BEAUTIFUL, SLIGHTLY OLDER MEN -- men who were also about to have some very moving queer revelations happen between them.

In other words -- the audiences had been titillated enough. As @bengiyo has reminded me: yaoi manga was tremendously popular in Thailand at this time, and showmakers were taking notice. The audiences were likely ready for ACTION-action. And MaxTul were up to the challenge.

(Also for context, I also want to acknowledge a note that @bengiyo sent to me about what Thailand was likely paying attention to across the rest of Asia -- as more BLs were coming out of Japan, Taiwan, and China before censorship. From those perspectives as well -- those different cultural reads on yaoi -- Thailand was likely also inspired. I seriously welcome input from the whole OGMMTVC family -- I’m thinking, besides @bengiyo, @absolutebl, @nieves-de-sugui, @so-much-yet-to-learn, and others might have insight on this -- about what outside cultural factors I’m likely missing from my analyses. I’d love to be filled in by the experts on any cross-cultural context y’all think is helpful from the comparative worldview of what was happening at this moment in time.)

So we get to MaxTul, KornKnock, that first scene of episode 1 that had me going WHOA -- I mean, I don’t know what I’ve missed in the intervening years, but even today, we don’t have many series just going STRAIGHT to it.

I was impressed.

Now, AFTER THAT? Oy vey, ha.

I wrote in a post right after I finished watching TwM, that I felt like while I had watched a show in a university setting, that for some reason, a lot of the show took me back to high school.

I wouldn’t criticize TwM as necessarily missing something by way of tone. Rather, I would argue that TwM experimented with a kind of tone that at least I haven’t experienced yet in my otherwise chronological watching of early Thai BLs. Namely -- TwM approached its material with a kind of...flippant tone, if that makes sense.

The script was larded with sexism and sometimes crude insinuations about queerness. The show went into VERY questionable territory with two ethical boundaries of doctor-patient relations and teacher-student relations. (I admittedly could not help but think of the recent debates around the Wat-Sani ship in the recent Our Skyy 2 x The Eclipse episodes -- but I think the Kavi x Phu ship was on a different, much more problematic level, as there was active engagement by a teacher to ultimately not separate herself from a student.) (And that didn’t even come close to approaching the problematic nature of the Dr. Bright x Farm ship.)

Really quickly about the sexism, before I get back to the boys. It was really interesting to me when it was used, and when it was NOT used. Plern is, in the words of @lurkingshan, the ultimate faen fatale. Bitchy, conniving, smart-but-not -- a true villain. Aim of Love Sick couldn’t even try to compete. Prae was a ditz, and Miki was vengeful, but Plern thought she was smart, had it all, and deserved everything she wanted without trying.

But Yihwa presented with LOYALTY, intelligence, insight, and grace. And Faii presented with a chill demeanor and analytical skills, and surprisingly -- even while she was ASSUMED to NOT be athletic -- was shown playing soccer/football BETTER than the boys, which I think was VERY NICE to see in a 2017 drama. (That pushed a neat kind of boundary for me.)

Yihwa and Faii in particular defy the paradigm of setting up female characters against stereotypes of male success. What made them possibly the strongest female characters I’ve seen in a BL is that they used the characteristics of their enemies to get back at their enemies. That was smart. They broke through a lot of what could have really sunk this show, and lifted the show intelligently.

So what COULD have sunk this show? List time:

1) The Dr. Bright x Farm ship. I was honestly so grossed out by this that I don’t even want to spend time writing on it. And I am HELL-FUCKING glad that I am NOT going NEAR the second season, because I understand that there’s a redemption arc for Bright. I’m very disappointed by this storyline, as I think it saddles an out gay man with stereotypes about sexual preferences that can be done safely (like group activity), and instead presented those preferences as predatory. And then Farm goes from played-to-player. In my opinion, when the Tumblr fam warned me about this show being toxic -- this ship was toxic factor #1 by far.

2) Knock and his cluelessness. Holding on an actual MaxTul analysis for the moment -- Korn and Knock were interesting characters for me to see interacting with each other. I mean, Korn’s admission to Knock, I would argue, actually came (HA HA) a little fast (HA HA) for Knock to process. No, but seriously. A passionate hook-up, Knock’s VERY adamant reaction towards Korn afterwards, and then Knock’s warbling back-and-forth between Plern and Korn. Knock had everything happening to him and at him -- gay-for-you, lingering girlfriend, the inching back to his same-sex lover -- and I’d argue that Knock was just a little...let’s say....diluted and bro-y about it all. I could have seen a little more emotional passion. I could have seen a little more real and introspective struggle (save for the internet posts). I did like that conversation Knock had with Bright about “gay for you” -- where Bright, as an out gay man, kind of corrected Knock to say, yes, it’s a little gay, what you’re feeling -- but that’s okay, it’s normal, and I’m here for you.

3) Jocks in love. But Knock’s behavior, and to an extent, Korn’s behavior as well, was, well -- jocky. Knock, I think, was very much like -- “why is this all happening to MEEEEE, my broooosss, crying on my beddddd??” To me, at least, what reminded me about high school with this show WAS this jockish approach to romance. The show presented Knock posting on the internet, for instance -- but not spending time thinking exactly about what those posts and answers meant.

For comparison, Bright and Farm, as the other same-sex ship in the show, were presented in a predatory match-up. We didn’t have femme-presenting characters (like Christina in MIR) or other trope-y or stereotypical elements of queer behavior that we had seen in dramas past.

I think the jocks-in-love approach to this show, which came naturally by way of how Max and Tul LOOK and CARRY THEMSELVES -- was risky. Knock was kind of the perfect nickname for that character. He wasn’t a dude that was very able to read between any lines. His true revelation about Plern came when idiot Plern spilled her beans to other people, that dumbass. And I think a lot of the way Knock accused Korn of Korn’s own feelings, and Korn’s behavior in “taking advantage” of Knock, came out of jockish cluelessness. When Korn said, “I love you, dipshit!”, “dipshit” was ABSOLUTELY the right word to use to the continually clueless Knock.

ALL OF THAT BEING SAID. (Leaving Bright and Farm aside forever, let us never speak their names again.)

I think Max and Tul themselves were a revelation. Were they AS SKILLED ACTORS as Singto in SOTUS, or Ohm and Toey in Make It Right? Oh god, no. Were they AS BAD as Krist? No, no, no one comes close. And were they AS INEXPERIENCED as Captain and White when those two first debuted? Also, no.

Max and Tul, I think, seized a different damn moment. I’m actually not sure I’d say there was electric chemistry between them. I think they both acted WELL, but there wasn’t EMOTIONAL sizzle, at least the kind I look for. They were certainly bros and homies -- but longing gazes à la Tee and Fuse, they did not have.

What they DID do, with their PHYSICALITY, was break boundaries by way of what we could SEE, without needing to read between lines or analyze shit. We just SAW THEM DO IT, tear off shirts and make out and bounce around and show off their muscular anatomy, and I think THAT was actually groundbreaking. I think IN THAT -- the boys knew EXACTLY what they were doing, they KNEW they could do it well, and they DID do it well -- and I didn’t see an iota of hesitation from either of them. And I thought that was really impressive. And I think these guys knew -- by DOING THAT SO WELL -- that they were breaking important ground in the world of television BL. The viewers -- those viewers who, like Knock, don’t like or WANT to read between lines -- THEY GOT what Max and Tul were serving.

What I also find impressive is that these guys IRL are serious allies. Their social media profiles, for the both of them, are gilded with allyship. That’s huge to me. (Tul at NYC Pride, come awn.) They’re owning their ownership of a slice of representation -- again, as jocky dudes in real life who engage fearlessly in queer material. (I now can’t wait for The Outing.)

Honestly? Yes, TwM was at times either painfully and/or hilariously toxic. I think the Bright x Farm ship is violent and harmful, and I truly wish it didn’t exist.

But I’m glad I watched TwM because -- well, fuck it, I’m an old mom, and I like to see jacked, shirtless dudes sometimes.

BUT ALSO: I think the makers of TwM knew that there were VIEWERS who WANTED TO JUST SEE QUEER MEN BE QUEER MEN WITH MEN, and you know what? I think the show’s creators said to themselves -- well, hot damn, maybe we have something here. And now’s (in 2017) the time for it. Sometimes I don’t want to read between the lines, too -- sometimes, I want a show that I can watch with a damn martini in a Solo cup and just be like, ooooh, man tiddies!

And the show creators found Max and Tul for Bad Romance, and realized, yes -- let’s spin this off, because there’s an audience out there who wants this. And I think that was accurate then, and now. Award-winning actors, Max and Tul are not. But they are VERY important to my historical understanding for how queer representation was progressing in BLs at the time of TwM -- in a vastly different fashion than Love Sick, SOTUS, and MIR had set up in their own worlds and their own paradigms.

I think TwM created a paradigm of its own -- one that I think has helped BL to grow at least in quantity, maybe not in quality, but at least paved a road that allowed creators to think and to say, well -- if we lead with the sex, we can still make a show. I see the OG BL fans on Tumblr marveling often at the sheer volume of BLs we have now. I want to think that that happened in part for what TwM created -- the permission, the openness, and the standard to do just that. And for the fans that want that content? We live in a world now where we have our fair share of shows to choose from. I think TwM created a paradigm that we didn’t know we needed in 2017. And I don’t regret -- even if it’s not my preferred style of drama -- having the option to watch a cheesy, jocky show every so often. Instead, I feel lucky that in 2023, I can have my choice.

[Alright! It was so much fun late-night liveblogging TwM and hopping on the Yihwa bandwagon, and I’m getting back into doing it for Make It Right 2. Thanks to everyone who answered my questions about TwM along the way: @manogirl, @nieves-de-sugui, @absolutebl, @crowie, @clairificusrex, @respectthepetty, @bengiyo, @shortpplfedup, @kyr-kun-chan, @telomeke, @miscellar (I will always be looking for the BBS connections, friends telomeke and miscellar, haha), @lurkingshan, and apologies if I’m missing anyone else -- thank you, family!

Watchlist update below, which is corrected for chronology for Make It Right 2. And...unbelievably...I’m adding something else to this list. I’m gonna add SOTUS S. I vowed I wouldn’t because of Krist, but. Since I am NOT, EVER, going to watch the continuation of TwM, I want to watch the continuation of another early series, besides Make It Right 2/FrameBook, to see the maturing of a relationship, as I’ve been involved in excellent convos with @bengiyo and friends about how length-and-depth-in-committed-relationships is NOT the most popular of BL themes -- but it’s a theme that literally brought me to Asian BLs via Kinou Nani Tabeta so many years ago. (I’ve read a lot that SOTUS S is better than SOTUS anyway, and it has my beloved Nammon in it.) I’m wondering if seeing a relationship developing and maturing is an important movement for Thai BLs at the end of 2017 into 2018, maybe a theme that hadn’t been explored YET, before TwM’s continuation, and one that might feed into the shows of 2018 and beyond. And I’m wondering if it’s important, as MaxTul was, for seeing the KristSingto ship move forward -- especially as I get prepared to FINALLY get to He’s Coming To Me, and getting to understand the impact of what Aof, Singto, and Ohm Pawat did to split the KristSingto ship. As always, I welcome any feedback!

1) Love Sick and Love Sick 2 (2014 and 2015) (review here) 2) SOTUS (2016) (review here) 3) Make It Right (2016) (review here) 4) Make It Right 2 (2017) (watching) 5) Together With Me (2017) 6) SOTUS S (2017-2018) 7) Love By Chance (2018) 8) Kiss Me Again: PeteKao cuts (2018) 9) He’s Coming To Me (2019) 10) Dark Blue Kiss (2019) 11) TharnType (2019) 12) Theory of Love (2019) 13) Dew the Movie (2019) (not an official part of the OGMMTVC watchlist, but I want to watch this in chronological order with everything else) 14) Until We Meet Again (2019-2020) 15) 2gether (2020) 16) Still 2gether (2020) 17) I Told Sunset About You (2020) 18) A Tale of Thousand Stars (2021) (review here) 19) I Promised You the Moon (2021) 20) Not Me (2021-2022) 21) Bad Buddy (2021-2022) (thesis here) 22) KinnPorsche (2022) (tag here) 23) The Eclipse (2022) (tag here) 24) My School President (2022-2023) 25) Moonlight Chicken (2023) (tag here)

#together with me #together with me meta #maxtul #korn x knock #knock x korn #kornknock #turtles catches up with the essential bls #turtles catches up with thai bls #turtles catches up with old gmmtv #the old gmmtv challenge #ogmmtvc #max nattapol #tul pakorn

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dweemeister · 1 year ago

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2023 Movie Odyssey Award for Best Original Song (preliminary round)

Tumblr’s new post editor has disabled completely the ability to make indented bullet points. I apologize in advance for how ugly most of this post looks.

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OPEN invites to (or at least people who are committed to the final, but would like access to the prelim): @birdsongvelvet, @derricklogan2, @dog-of-ulthar, @inmyworldblr, @machpowervisions, @memetoilet, @metamatar, @myluckyerror, @noelevangilinecarson, @phendranaedge, @plus-low-overthrow, @qteeclown, @shadesofhappy, and @the-lilac-grove. Some of you have participated in past MOABOS editions, some of you are longtime followers I've not really spoken to, but have interacted with quite a few of my posts... if you are interested, please let me know. I'll assign you a group or I'll put you into the final.

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Hello everybody,

If you were tagged here, that is because you graciously accepted my invitation to help out with this year's edition of the Movie Odyssey Award for Best Original Song (MOABOS). I welcome you to the eleventh edition of MOABOS (MOABOS XI) and the tenth edition with outside help from family, friends, and followers on tumblr. When I first opened this up to other folks in 2014 (MOABOS II), I believed that this would last but only a few years, at most. And every time the year is new, I have no clue whether or not there will be another edition of MOABOS.

But here we are yet again. The Movie Odyssey Award for Best Original Song is not possible without all of your help.

For newcomers near and far: This is a classic film blog (concentration: pre-1980s Hollywood, but I have various specialties outside of that and watch plenty of newer films). That blog's primary purpose is to host my nearly 800 film write-ups tagged "My Movie Odyssey" (an index can be found here). MOABOS is one of my blog's year-end traditions, and just a smaller part of a larger one. On my blog, the Movie Odyssey Awards honor some of the best achievements from movies that I saw for the first time this calendar year (the "Movie Odyssey") with an Oscar-like ceremony. I choose all the nominees and winners from each category, save one: Best Original Song. It is the only category that does not require you to watch several movies in their entirety. MOABOS is my way to say thank you for your friendship and moral support no matter how long I've known you. It is, sneakily so, a way to introduce all of you to music and movies I enjoyed this past year. And you might learn a snippet of film history through this!

INTRODUCTION

An unspecified number of songs have already advanced to the final round. 24 songs will contest this preliminary round in two groups - Group A and Group B. After three years of pandemic disruptions, the 2020s are finally making a significant mark on MOABOS, perhaps with a vengeance. Some of the highest-grossing films of both 2023 and 2022 are here to contend, as is a movie newly-minted as one of the highest-grossing anime films ever. But the defending decade, the 1980s (through Dolly Parton's title song for 1980's 9 to 5), has plenty of entries this year. It is the decade of pop culture I like least, but the 1980s have a decent shot at being the first decade to defend a MOABOS title.

Last year was regrettably a monolingual field of songs. Folks, multilingual MOABOS is back. This year, across both groups, English, French, Hindi (returning for the first time since 2020, or MOABOS VIII), Japanese (also returning after a three-year absence), Brazilian Portuguese, and Vietnamese will be represented. For their respective movies, they capture just a part of a nation's soul and filmmaking culture at a certain time. MOABOS, too, is its own sort of time capsule.

After a few years of slight decline, the preliminary round of MOABOS drew a record 36 people casting rankings. Might that record fall this year? That same preliminary saw a resounding rejection of American folk music (or spoofs of American folk, at least) and a decidedly mixed opinion of the style of Golden Age 20th Century Fox musicals (their plots might be silly and nonsensical, but at least they have no pretensions of being anything more than that!). No American folk this year, but 20th Century Fox has a few contenders this year.

1980s and contemporary pop have historically performed well in the preliminaries. With some formidable entries this year that receive regular radio play, does that hold up or are there upsets in the cards?

2019's MOABOS (MOABOS VII) preliminary remains the gold standard for sheer chaos. The miraculous comeback of "I Dug a Ditch" from Thousands Cheer (1943) in the prelim's final hour brought a song that seemed dead as a doorknob back to life. A song about digging a hole got out of its hole, if you will. No group since has ever matched that drama. Might this be a nailbiter of a result?

INSTRUCTIONS

Please rank (#1-11) at least seven of your group's songs. Please consider to the best of your ability (these are only suggestions, not strict guidelines):

How musically interesting the song is (incl. and not limited to musical phrasing and orchestration);

Its lyrics (incl. and not limited to lyrical invention and lyrical flow);

Context within the film (contextual blurbs provided for every entry for those who haven't seen the films);

Choreography/dance direction (if applicable; I know that almost none of us have a dancing background, but let's not discount this aspect entirely);

The song's cultural/sociopolitical impact and legacy/listenability outside the film's context (if applicable, and, in my opinion, least important factor)

A notice on audio/video quality and colorization of black-and-white film: Because it is sometimes difficult to find clean recordings of much of this music, imperfections in audio and video quality may not be used against any song while you are drawing up your rankings - you're on the honor system on this one. In addition, in respect to personal and blog policy, I will not provide colorized videos of films that were originally in black-and-white. You can call this snobby all you want. But to yours truly, film colorization of B&W is disrespectful to the artisans who plied their craft and made decisions based on the fact the film was shot in black-and-white. It is essentially redirecting a movie without consent.

You are encouraged to send in comments and reactions with your rankings - it makes the process more enjoyable for you and myself!

The top six songs in each group automatically advance to the final round. Unlike previous years, no at-large wild card picks outside the top six will advance to the final.

The deadline for submission is Wednesday, December 13 at 11 PM Pacific Time. That is 9 PM Hawaii/Aleutian Time. That deadline is also Thursday, December 14 at 1 AM Central Time / 2 AM Eastern Time / 7 AM GMT / 8 AM CET / 9 AM EET. This deadline - and some of you have joked with me that this is inevitable - will be pushed back if there are a large number of people who have not submitted in time. However, I very much do not wish to extend the deadline because the final round is more intensive and usually involves more participants. A small group of longtime MOABOS veterans will be asked to do both groups, if possible (but they are required to complete their assigned group first before moving on) - they are generally selected for their longevity of MOABOS participation and promptness. Tabulation details are under the "read more".

Please pay attention to the groups you have been sorted into, and please only submit rankings for the group you have been assigned. For your convenience, the YouTube playlists for both groups follow:

PLAYLISTS: (GROUP A) / (GROUP B)

Group A: be warned, I am somewhat trolling you on one of these songs. At least it comes early!

Feel free to listen as many times as you need, and I hope you discover music and movies that strike your interest. With the deepest appreciation from this grateful classic film fan, here are your group's songs. The following is formatted... ("Song title", composer and lyricist, film title):

GROUP A

“Apartment for Sale”, music and lyrics by Cate Blanchett and Todd Field, Tár (2022)

Performed by Cate Blanchett

After her cross-hall apartment neighbor dies, composer/conductor Lydia Tár (Blanchett; whose character is the first female music director of the Berlin Philharmonic) learns from the deceased's family that they think the classical music emanating from Tár's apartment is an unlistenable racket. They bluntly request Tár to stop playing music entirely when they meet with potential buyers. Moments after that encounter, this is her response. By this point in the film, Tár's rationality is very much in question. This is a drama about the hubris and manipulative ways for a person in power.

This is the shortest song ever to qualify for a MOABOS preliminary round.

“Barsaat mein hamse mile tum sajan (In the Rainy Season, We Met One Another)”, music by Shankarsingh Raghuwanshi and Jaikishan Dayabhai Panchal, lyrics by Shailendra, Barsaat (1949)

(initial version) / (end-of-film reprise)

Performed by Nimmi (singing voice dubbed by Lata Mangeshkar)

Lyrics in Hindi (translations in the CC's in provided videos)

Raj Kapoor was a major director/actor in the early decades of Bollywood. In one of his first directed movies, shortly after the Partition of India, we find Barsaat. This romance tells of two love stories of city men meeting women who live in Kashmir (a disputed region between India, Pakistan, and China). Later in the films, we will find Pran (Raj Kapoor) and Reshma (Nargis) quickly falling in love. But this song surrounds the womanizing Gopal (Prem Nath) and Neela (Nimmi), whose faithful love for Gopal goes largely unrequited. After much convincing from Neela, Gopal attends a local festival – and doesn't pay much attention to this Neela-led song-and-dance number.

In the reprise, Neela has died near the end of the film. Reformed, realizing too late how horrible he has been to Neela, Gopal carries her body to her funeral pyre as the monsoon rains – as hinted in this film's very title – finally arrive.

“Ciao Papa”, music by Alexandre Desplat, lyrics by Roeban Katz and Guillermo del Toro, Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio (2022)

Performed by Gregory Mann

In this stop-motion animated adaptation of Carlo Collodi's Pinocchio, director Guillermo del Toro injects the tale with his signature gothic touch – moving the narrative up in time to Fascist Italy and not shying away from the original book's grotesqueness and the title character's sociopathy. This song appears as part of a montage where Geppetto (David Bradley) goes in search of Pinocchio (Mann) after Count Volpe (Christoph Waltz) abducts the wooden son.

“Esse Mundo é Meu (This World is Mine)”, music by Sérgio Ricardo, lyrics by Sérgio Ricardo and Ruy Guerra, Esse Mundo é Meu (1964, Brazil)

Originally performed a cappella by Antônio Pitanga; provided version performed by Marina Lutfi and Adriana Lutfi (lead vocals), Sérgio Ricardo (vocals), João Gurgel (vocal/guitar), Alexandre Caldi (winds), Marcelo Caldi (piano/accordion), Lui Coimbra (cello), Giordano Gasperin (bass), and Diego Zangado (percussion)

Lyrics in Portuguese (extremely rough translated lyrics... "Saravá ogum" is an Afro-Brazilian exclamation; I'm not sure what "Mandinga" means in the song's context, but it's an Afro-Brazilian word that either refers to an ethnic group or "magic")

In this film almost never screened outside Brazil, two separate romantic storylines – a white couple and a black couple – play out in a Rio de Janeiro favela. In the latter storyline, Antônio Pitanga plays a shoeshiner. One day, while setting up his shoeshining equipment along the beach, he sings this song – an optimistic number in hopes for a better tomorrow. Black Brazilian romance was and is rare in Brazilian cinema, and the inclusion of such a romance so prominently featured in this film makes it a landmark of the nation's film history.

From the song's humble origins and use in the film, Sérgio Ricardo turned it into bossa nova. That's the late composer/film director himself in the provided video (the older man furthest to the left). The lead singers are his daughters.

“Hold My Hand” , music and lyrics by Lady Gaga and BloodPop, Top Gun: Maverick (2022)

Performed by Lady Gaga

Nominated for the Academy Award for Best Original Song

This song, with touches of '80s arena rock and torch songs, appears at the top of the end credits. It is not quoted in the film's score at any point in this equally jingoistic sequel to the original Top Gun.

“I Know Why (And So Do You)”, music by Mack Gordon, lyrics by Harry Warren, Sun Valley Serenade (1941)

(initial version) / (reprise)

Performed by Glenn Miller and His Orchestra, Lynn Bari (dubbed by Pat Friday), The Modernaires, and John Payne; reprise by Payne and Sonja Henie

This song's melody forms the backbone of the film's score throughout. In the opening minutes of this musical, we find the Phil Corey Orchestra (Glenn Miller and His Orchestra) rehearsing in preparation for a Christmas concert they will be headlining in the mountainous resort town of Sun Valley, Idaho. The first 48 seconds of the first video are an instrumental version of Glenn Miller's "Moonlight Serenade".

The reprise occurs near the end of the film as Norwegian refugee/figure skating extraordinaire Karen Benson (Sonja Henie, a 3x Olympic gold medalist in figure skating) and pianist Ted Scott (John Payne) find themselves stuck in a mountainside cabin. Karen, who has fled Norway due to the Nazi takeover there, has been pursuing Ted for almost all of the film, and Ted finally succumbs to her charms here - to the outrage of his girlfriend (Lynn Bari). Suffice it to say nobody should watch 20th Century Fox musicals for the plot (but refreshingly, they're not pretending to be any more than what they are).

“Jean”, music and lyrics by Rod McKuen, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1969)

Performed by Rod McKuen

Nominated for the Academy Award for Best Original Song

Adapted from Muriel Spark's novel of the same name and set in 1930s Edinburgh, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie stars Maggie Smith as Jean Brodie, a teacher at an all-girls school. Brodie, a woman with unorthodox teaching methods, has a cadre of favorite students nicknamed the "Brodie Set": Sandy (Pamela Franklin), Monica (Shirley Steedman), Jenny (Diane Grayson), and Mary (Jane Carr). Each of them are around twelve years old when the film begins. This film, an atypical "teacher movie", is about a breakdown of professionalism, betrayal of trust, loss of innocence, and hubris.

The melodic structure is inspired by the style of Scottish folk songs, and it forms the central spine of the film's score and plays throughout. The song itself is not performed with lyrics until the end credits. Due to the events in the film's closing act, the tone, placement, and lyrics of "Jean" become ironic. The lyrics are decidedly romantic but, in context, it's anything but.

“Miss Celie’s Blues (Sister)”, music by Quincy Jones and Rod Temperton, lyrics by Quincy Jones, Rod Temperton, and Lionel Richie, The Color Purple (1985)

Performed by Margaret Avery (singing voice dubbed by Táta Vega)

Nominated for the Academy Award for Best Original Song

Based on the book of the same name by Alice Walker, The Color Purple stars Whoopi Goldberg as Celie Harris in her breakthrough role. Celie, forcibly married off to Albert "Mister" Johnson (Danny Glover) as a teenager, has grown resigned after a lifetime of parental and spousal abuse. Mister has a mistress named Shug Avery (Margaret Avery), who works as a showgirl in Memphis. After one stormy evening, a sickly Shug appears at Mister's homestead for the first time and, over a few weeks, Celie nurses her back to health. The two grow attached and, as tribute, Shug performs this song at the local riverside juke joint.

In the book, the romantic relationship between Celie and Shug after this moment is more explicit. Director Steven Spielberg's greatest regret over this film was not making more of this romantic relationship. Given that the movie was released at the height of the HIV/AIDS crisis and in an environment where LGBTQ+ themes were verboten to the major movie studios, I don't believe much more could've been done in 1985.

“Pink”, music and lyrics by Lizzo, Mark Ronson, Andrew Wyatt, and Ricky Reed, Barbie (2023)

(initial version) / (reprise)

Performed by Lizzo

After narrator Helen Mirren describes to the audience Barbieland, we are introduced to Barbie (Margot Robbie), just awakening from a good night's sleep, with the initial version of "Pink". At the end of that day at the nightly dance party, Barbie asks her fellow Barbies if they ever think about death – a Barbie faux pas. Barbie corrects herself, but remains haunted by her question when she goes to bed that evening. We hear the reprise as Barbie awakens the next morning after barely sleeping, and everything that can go wrong does go wrong.

“That Darn Cat!”, composed by Richard M. Sherman and Robert B. Sherman, That Darn Cat! (1965)

Performed by Bobby Darin

Appears in the opening credits and final minutes of this comedy. That Darn Cat! marked the end of an era and the start of another. This was Hayley Mills' final of six films for Disney (a run that included the title character in 1960's Pollyanna and in her dual role in the original Parent Trap) and Dean Jones' first for Disney. The provided version includes audio from the opening credits, extracted directly from the film itself (a stipulation in Darin's contract means that the original soundtrack version is nowhere to be found online).

“Trời Sáng Rồi, Ta Ngủ Đi Thôi (Good Morning and Good Night)”, music by Phạm Hải Âu, lyrics by Phạm Hải Âu and Chung Chí Công, Good Morning and Good Night (2019, Vietnam)

Performed by Hà Quốc Hoàng and Trần Lê Thúy Vy

Lyrics in Vietnamese (translation in provided video)

In this romantic musical influenced heavily by Richard Linklater's Before trilogy, indie musician Tâm (Hà Quốc Hoàng) unexpectedly forms a deep connection with Thanh (Trần Lê Thúy Vy), a rideshare driver who challenges his view of life, love, and art. This song appears at the top of the end credits. Most of the numbers in this film are composed in a style suited to Vietnamese indie music.

“When I Grow Up”, music by Ray Henderson, lyrics by Ted Koehler and Irving Caesar, Curly Top (1935)

Performed by Shirley Temple; first reprise (not provided) by Billy Gilbert and Arthur Treacher; second reprise (not provided) by Esther Dale

Orphan Elizabeth Blair (Temple) performs this at a charity show meant to raise funds for the orphanage she is staying at. At certain points in this song, she dresses up in a wedding gown and dons "old" makeup in respect to the lyrics.

Where Alice Faye and Betty Grable may have been the two primary musical adult actresses at 20th Century Fox, Shirley Temple eclipsed both. Her modestly-budgeted movies showcased her childhood innocence and spunk, endearing her to a moviegoing public faced with the dire straits of the Great Depression. She was the highest-grossing actor in Hollywood from 1934-1938, and moviegoers of the Lost, Greatest, and early Silent Generations credit Temple's movies as needed morale boosters.

The folks assigned to GROUP A include: @cinemaocd, @cokwong, @emilylime5, @exlibrisneh, @idontknowmuchaboutmovies, @maximiliani, @shootingstarvenator, and @stephdgray. You are also being joined by 15 others including myself and my sister.

GROUP B

“Animal Crackers in My Soup”, music by Ray Henderson, lyrics by Ted Koehler and Irving Caesar, Curly Top (1935)

Performed by Shirley Temple

Young Elizabeth Blair (Temple) and her elder sister, Mary (Rochelle Hudson) are living in an orphanage and are the primary entertainers for their fellow orphan girls. This number occurs early in the film and is quoted multiple times in the film's score. For those of you who despised this song's placement in those Shirley Temple DVD infomercials, I have no apologies to offer you.

Where Alice Faye (MOABOS X's "A Journey to a Star" from 1943's The Gang's All Here) and Betty Grable may have been the two primary musical adult actresses at 20th Century Fox, Shirley Temple eclipsed both. Her modestly-budgeted movies showcased her childhood innocence and spunk, endearing her to a moviegoing public faced with the dire straits of the Great Depression. She was the highest-grossing actor in Hollywood from 1934-1938, and moviegoers of the Lost, Greatest, and early Silent Generations credit Temple's movies as needed morale boosters.

“Barbarella”, music and lyrics by Bob Crewe and Charles Fox, Barbarella (1968)

Performed by The Glitterhouse

Played over the opening credits (not provided, because they are extremely NSFW) in which the title character (Jane Fonda) slowly undresses herself in zero gravity. Based on a controversially racy and heavily sexualized comic book series in France (even for the French!), Barbarella is a campy sci-fi movie that obliterated Fonda's homespun image in cinema. The movie was and is far more popular in Europe than it was in the U.S. (where it never became anything more than a cult classic).

In the years since, Fonda, a noted liberal activist, has essentially pleaded no contest to accusations that the film was anything but feminist.

“Captain Crow”, music by Nell Benjamin and Laurence O’Keefe, The Sea Beast (2022)

Performed by chorus

Appears in part during a celebratory night at a pub in the film's opening act. Full appearance at the top of the end credits. This is a sea shanty celebrating the legendary monster hunter Captain Crow (Jared Harris). The melody is seldom quoted in the film's score. In The Sea Beast, an unnamed country has waged a centuries-long campaign to kill sea beasts, in defense of humanity. Similar to American Westerns, the film and this song plays with ideas of how popular narratives or mythoi are spun.

(Instrumental-only version for those interested... many versions in different languages are available on YouTube, including French, Hindi, Italian, Spanish, Vietnamese, and more – some lyrically clunkier than others)

“I’m Just Ken”, music and lyrics by Mark Ronson and Andrew Wyatt, Barbie (2023)

Performed by Ryan Gosling and company

The Kens of Barbieland have just taken over power from the Barbies. In response, the Barbies, Allan, and Mattel employee Gloria and her daughter Sasha have manipulated the Kens into fighting each other while they attempt to reestablish control. According to director Greta Gerwig, the dance segment seen here was influenced by "Lullaby of Broadway" from Gold Diggers of 1935 (1935; see the warm-up playlist I sent to many of you) and "The Broadway Melody" from Singin' in the Rain (1952).

“Mujhe Kisi se Pyaar Ho Gaya (I’ve Fallen in Love with Someone)”, music by Shankarsingh Raghuwanshi and Jaikishan Dayabhai Panchal, lyrics by Shailendra, Barsaat (1949, India)

Performed by Nargis (singing voice dubbed by Lata Mangeshkar)

Lyrics in Hindi (translations in the CC's in provided videos)

Raj Kapoor was a major director/actor in the early decades of Bollywood. In one of his first directed movies, shortly after the Partition of India, we find Barsaat. This romance tells of two love stories of vacationing city men meeting women who live in Kashmir (a disputed region between India, Pakistan, and China). This film juxtaposes the story of the womanizing Gopal (Prem Nath) and Neela (Nimmi), with that of Pran (Raj Kapoor) and Reshma (Nargis). It is the beginning of Pran and Reshma's romance that we see here, after she has been rowing Gopal and Pran around for the last few days.

“Qu'est-ce qu'on fait de l'amour? (What Do We Do with Love?)”, music and lyrics by Vincent Courtois, Ernest and Celestine: A Trip to Gibberitia (2022, France)

Performed by Pomme

Lyrics in French (rough translation)

This song appears at the top of the end credits of this sequel to 2012's Ernest & Celestine, which was nominated (against the odds) for the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature. The original was, as I wrote back in 2014, "cinematic friendship at its most rewarding and profoundly beautiful." In this sequel for our dynamic mouse and bear duo, Celestine (the mouse) accidentally breaks Ernest's (the bear) precious Stradibearius violin. It leads the unlikely friends to search for an old violin maker acquaintance of Ernest's back in his homeland of Gibberitia ("Charabïe" in the original title, a name derived from "charabia", the French word for "gibberish").

A further shameless plug for all of you reading this to seek out animation that is not from the major American and Japanese studios.

“Return to Sender”, music and lyrics by Winfield Scott and Otis Blackwell, Girls! Girls! Girls! (1962)

Performed by Elvis Presley

The eleventh of Elvis' 31 movies (if MOABOS returns for future editions, let's just say there's a lot more Elvis to come) and the second shot in Hawai'i after 1961's Blue Hawaii, Girls! Girls! Girls! is a misnomer as there are only two girls vying for Elvis' affections (it would be an appropriate title for many other Elvis movies). My sister thinks this film should've been titled Girls? Girls. Girls!

Here, Ross Carpenter (Elvis) is a fisherman who spends his evenings as a nightclub singer. Fellow nightclub singer Robin Gantner (Stella Stevens) and the secretly wealthy Laurel Dodge (Laurel Goodwin) are very much attracted to him. This number occurs after Ross starts seeing Laurel, inflaming Robin's suspicions, and resulting in a spat at the bar that immediately preceded the song.

“Something He Can Feel”, music and lyrics by Curtis Mayfield, Sparkle (1976)

Performed by Lonette McKee, Irene Cara, and Dwan Smith

(use in film) / (soundtrack version with Aretha Franklin)

Loosely based on the history of the Supremes, the musical Sparkle is the story of the three Williams sisters (the late Cara as lead singer Sparkle, McKee as Sister, and Smith as Dolores). They decide, along with two of their boyfriends, to take their church singing experience and turn into a semi-professional group called the Hearts.

This song appears midway through the film, as the boys have dropped out to become the group's managers. The Williams sisters have renamed the group Sister and the Sisters (I would've kept the original name). The performance of this number is intercut with glimpses of Sister's troubled personal life – the film's Rubicon crossing, setting up the conclusion of her storyline.

The film's original soundtrack does not contain any of the original performances. Instead, Aretha Franklin sings all the songs from the film in the soundtrack.

“Suzume”, music and lyrics by RADWIMPS, Suzume (2022, Japan)

Performed by RADWIMPS and Toaka

Lyrics in Japanese (extremely rough translation)

This song's melody (especially the eighteen-note vocalized motif) appears throughout the film. But this version, with lyrics, only appears as the second song in the end credits. In this film, 17-year-old Suzume and a young man named Souta must journey across Japan to close a series of mystical doors. Mysterious phenomena are passing through these once-locked into our world, and are causing natural disasters.

Makoto Shinkai's latest, unadjusted for inflation, is the fourth-highest grossing Japanese film of all time. MOABOS regulars will recall previous entries from Your Name (2016) and Weathering with You (2019) – all RADWIMPS compositions. Suzume directly addresses a trauma that Your Name and Weathering with You danced around: the 3/11/11 earthquake, tsunami, and Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster.

“Take My Breath Away”, music and lyrics by Giorgio Moroder and Tom Whitlock, Top Gun (1986)

Performed by Berlin

Winner of the Academy Award for Best Original Song

This song plays during romantic dialogue between Maverick (Tom Cruise) and Charlotte "Charlie" Blackwood (Kelly McGillis). Top Gun never plays the entire song. In its inexplicable four appearances in the film in a 20-minute span, the song itself is played muted underneath the dialogue, its lyrics barely discernible in those respective scenes.

“Tiền”, music and lyrics by Trần Khắc Trí, Good Morning and Good Night (2019, Vietnam)

Performed by Trần Lê Thúy Vy, Hà Quốc Hoàng, and company

In this romantic musical influenced heavily by Richard Linklater's Before trilogy, indie musician Tâm (Hà Quốc Hoàng) unexpectedly forms a deep connection with Thanh (Trần Lê Thúy Vy), a rideshare driver who challenges his view of life, love, and art over a full day. This song appears about a third of the way through, after a conversation about money ("tiền" means "money" in Vietnamese). Most of the numbers in this film are composed in a style suited to Vietnamese indie music.

“We Don’t Need Another Hero (Thunderdome)”, music and lyrics by Terry Britten and Graham Lyle, Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome (1985)

Performed by Tina Turner

This song plays at the top of the end credits of the Mad Max series' third entry. In this movie, the late Tina Turner herself plays the antagonist (but neither true villain or antihero) Aunty Entity - who leads a post-apocalyptic trading post called Bartertown. "Thunderdome" refers to a gladiatorial arena in Bartertown in which conflicts are settled in a battle to the death (an aside: awkward as "Thunderdome" sounds as a lyric, it makes more sense than "Thunderball" from the 007 movie of the same name).

The folks assigned to GROUP B include: @addaellis, @halfwaythruthedark, @rawberry101, @rosymeraki-blog, @theybecomestories, @umgeschrieben, @underblackwings, and @yellanimal. You are also being joined by 14 others including myself and my sister.

Would you like to know something more about a song or a movie featured above? Do you have a question or comment about MOABOS's processes? Feel free to ask me! If you are having difficulty accessing any of the songs (especially if region-locked) or if there are any errors in the links above or the playlist, please let me know as soon as possible.

You will be contacted for the final round regardless of your participation or non-participation in the preliminary. If turnout in one group is lagging behind compared to another, I will ask some of the more senior participants to participate in the other group, too. Do not worry too much about this if you cannot participate, although I will be checking in as the deadlines near.

Once more to all of you here, my thanks for your support for the Movie Odyssey, the blog, and for me personally over however long I've known you. It's a privilege and a pleasure to share all these movies (well, excerpts of them) and musical numbers with you. It's my hope that you not only learn something new about film and/or music, but that you also find this very fun to do!

Happy listening, all. And thank you again!

TABULATION FOR THE PRELIMINARY ROUND

This preliminary round uses a points-based, ranked choice method which has been in use since MOABOS II (2014). A respondent’s first choice receives 10 points, the second choice receives 9, the third choice receives 8, etc. The winner is the song that ends up with the most total points. The tabulation method described here for the preliminary round is used only as a tiebreaker in the final round (more on how the final is tabulated when we get there).

The tiebreakers for the preliminary are:

total points earned;

total #1 votes;

song(s) which is/are ranked higher on more ballots than the other(s);

average placement on my and my sister's ballots;

tie declared

#Movie Odyssey Award for Best Original Song #Movie Odyssey Awards #MOABOS

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married-2-the-music · 1 year ago

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K-pop Discography Deep Dives: Red Velvet (Part ONE)

A Disclaimer: I was planning, when I first started Tumblr, to be a lurker, but then I began an office job and needed something to listen to to keep myself occupied. And then, I started going through entire K-pop groups’ repertoires, album by album, and jotting down my thoughts. And then, I stumbled into K-pop tumblr and decided, you know what, there’s at least four people on this hell site who would read in depth rants about these discographies and at least five who wouldn’t read it and then get mad because it’s kind of our job as K-pop fans. My lukewarm takes should be taken with an entire silo of salt and the knowledge that this is completely for fun and occupying my very bored, very neurodivergent brain. All this to say, for the love of god, I’m a sleep-deprived student and I don’t have time for internet hate, so don’t kill me. With that being said, enjoy!

Here are my credentials: Red Velvet was the first k-pop group I ever loved, even though Blackpink was really my introduction. I became a ReVeLuv in 2019, because of Russian Roulette, and I’ve been a fan since, including of the members’ solo careers (Wendy in particular). But as I’ve gotten more into k-pop and since they come back so infrequently, I haven’t really been keeping up with them and I feel like I’m less of a fan than I once was. So, I’m super excited for their comeback on the 13th (especially with a full album!) and I’m hoping that through this deep dive, I’ll fall back in love just in time for the new album.

Red Velvet is almost a decade old, having debuted with four members (Wendy, Joy, Irene, and Seulgi) in 2014, with the 5th, Yeri, being added the year after. Red Velvet is known for their dual concept: the poppier, brighter Red side and the R & B focused, more sensual Velvet side, which sets them apart from many girl groups of their time that were pigeonholed into either “cute / naive” or “sexy / mature”.

Happiness is their official 2014 debut (again, with four members). While I do like this song, I don’t find myself coming back to it often because it just doesn’t sound like Red Velvet to me; it’s bubbly and odd, but in a similar way to a lot of k-pop; it sounds like many other “quirky” k-pop groups from the same time, and just a bit too young for a group who were all adults at the time. Wendy’s bridge remains a highlight, but like NingNing’s vocal showcase in Next Level, it doesn’t fit the song enough, and I wish it was in a better one so I could love it more.

Be Natural is the balance of sorts to Happiness, a more mature R & B track that’s a cover of the 2001 classic by S.E.S. I love the jazzy background of this one, and the kind of drawn-out pull of the vocals that sound much smoother than in Happiness. It was this song that proved RV could be more than just their debut, and could tackle both more childish and more grown-up concepts. While this is a cover, they put their own spin on it, though I admit I’m not a fan of Taeyong’s part, as I’m almost never in favor of random rap verses in very subdued songs. Also, I’m not a choreo blog, but shoutout to all the difficult work that they do dancing on the chairs, because my back hurts just watching it.

Ice Cream Cake marks the introduction of Yeri, which gives me a fair bit of bias towards this as I’m happy to see them all together. It’s bubbly and bright with almost impressive amounts of aegyo that’s definitely a product of its overly bubbly 2015 k-pop world, especially the rap verse that just jumps in out of nowhere. While it has far more personality than Happiness does (like in the slight creepiness of the playground-esque lalalala’s and the bizarre music video), I think that it’s still very much a marker of the beginning stage of Red Velvet’s career when they were still figuring out their identity as a band. I want to be clear that it’s not a bad song. But it doesn’t stack up to the instant classics that we’ll see in a bit.

Automatic, like Be Natural for Happiness, is the Velvet balance for Ice Cream Cake, and where ICC feels very young, Automatic is far more sleek and graceful in its delivery. It’s a gentle R & B track that glides along like it’s dancing on its tiptoes the whole time. It clearly was put together after the success of the Be Natural cover, and while there are similarities, I prefer Automatic for two reasons: a) Yeri’s there, rounding out the voices well, and b) It sounds more like a Red Velvet song, with a few little quirks. The instrumental is minimalistic, which lets the voices speak for themselves, and it’s the first title in this series I’ve loved on first re-listen.

From the Ice Cream Cake EP, Stupid Cupid was an immediate favorite. Starting off with that Western-movie-esque guitar, its intonation and production is reminiscent of a 2nd gen title, Girls Generation in particular. Normally I’m not a fan of a slight drop between pre-chorus and chorus, but it works here. I even don’t mind the rap verse, as the humor in it fits more with the tone of the song than one usually does. I never gave this song a second thought before, so I’m glad I found it.

Dumb Dumb is the first song that feels quintessentially Red Velvet in this review. It’s very much a “throw things at the wall” track, with that delightfully funky instrumental and a never-stopping drumline that feels like it’s beating your heart for you. It’s a song that feels like it shouldn’t work, between the key changes, the tempo changes, the many repetitions, the chanting, etc, and yet…it does? Dumb Dumb toes about five dozen tightropes perfectly, and I have no idea how. This song has so many things that are genuine pet peeves of mine, but I love it anyway, and if anyone could pull this off (with a random verse honoring Michael Jackson), it’s them.

The Red is almost universally known as an excellent album, and I can’t talk about every song (even though I would!), so I’ll just talk about a few of my favorites: Huff n’ Puff, Campfire, and Don’t U Wait No More. Huff n’ Puff bounces back and forth with an oddly warped instrumental and off-beat clapping, then ties it all together with a great bridge and its titular refrain. Campfire has more sing talk than I normally enjoy, but it’s still melodic and its brassy chorus more than makes up for it. And Don’t U Wait No More has an interestingly clipped call and response in its chorus that is now very much stuck in my head.

One Of These Nights is a surprising choice for a single, especially for 2016. Many reviewers responded with mixed or even negative opinions on it after the delightful bombast that is Dumb Dumb, and I can see why they did. One Of These Nights is not a song for everyone; it’s quiet, melancholy, and honestly depressing, and yet it’s so beautiful and heartfelt that it’s honestly my favorite of their singles. It was made to mark the Korean festival of Chuseok (that is, in legend, the one day of the year where two fabled lovers can reunite, before they have to part again), and that gentle yearning and happiness with an edge of tragedy is so comforting for anyone coming out of grief but still remembering the good times. Red Velvet’s voices are something special; they’re great separately, but together, they’re just stunning.

The Velvet is less critically praised than The Red, but I love both Rose Scent Breeze and Light Me Up. Rose Scent Breeze may seem like just another b-side at first, but it soon goes from gentle melancholy to a furious guitar riff-led power ballad that lifts you up without losing its palpable emotion. Light Me Up is an R & B song too, but has a youthful energy and a joy not found in their other “Velvet” songs. As both a queer person and a huge fan of Wendy’s voice, I admit I like her “La Rouge” version more than the original, though the harmonizing at the end feels like honest-to-god floating.

Russian Roulette starts with a similarly creepy “lalala” to the one in Ice Cream Cake, and was actually the first Red Velvet song I ever heard. It bounds forward with the choppy energy of a classic video game, and between the insane catchiness of its hook and the bizarre combination of murderous Tom-and-Jerry imagery and skyscrapers of aegyo, it’s no surprise it went viral. It both fits perfectly into k-pop cliches and pokes fun at them in the process, zig-zagging between what seems like a sweet love song and the visuals of a gang of expressionless dolls. It is…utterly bizarre, and, just like the first time, I’m utterly enthralled.

What to say about the EP? I love this entire album, and it’s so hard to choose a hidden gem. Lucky Girl, Fool, and Bad Dracula are all excellent tracks, and I love all of the different combinations of doo-wop, synth, and other vintage genres too. I’ve got to say that my favorite is Lucky Girl, though, partially for the delightful catchiness of the song as a whole, partially for the inclusion of actual “shoo-be-doo-wop” vocalization, and partially for the immaculate Girls Generation-esque 50’s/60’s production.

Rookie is not and never has been a song for me. It’s not that it’s a bad song, per se, and I actually enjoy the greater part of the verses. Red Velvet’s voices are great as always, and I also love that bridge. This song, truth be told, annoys me more than anything, because it’s so, so close to being good. But why, why, why, did they have to give it a chanty, aegyo-filled hook? Come on, guys, we were almost there. We could’ve had another so-crazy-it-just-might-work situation like Dumb Dumb, but instead there’s too much crazy and not enough working for me.

From the Rookie EP, I honestly preferred almost every song to the title, but Little Little was my favorite. It’s slow and quiet at first, and during the verses, you’ll think it’s bound to be depressing. But then, like an opposite version of Rookie, the chorus completely changes the song, turning it into a dreamy R & B ballad that’s been a fixture on my sleep playlist for years.

If the last few songs have been upbeat, Red Flavor is practically jubilant. It’s been called THE summer k-pop song, and for good reason. It bounces off the metaphorical walls, full of delight and youthful energy. Even the verses, albeit slower, set up that juggernaut of a chorus with its distinctive “red, red, red flavor” distortion in the post. I’m sure this is just me being a ReVeLuv, but this song is so nostalgic for me and never fails to make me a bit sappy, especially the slightly wistful outro. I don’t mind the rap, but I wish we could’ve gotten more of the singing section of the bridge instead. Overall though I really like this one.

The Red Summer is one of their strongest EPs, and while I wanted to give Mojito a quick shout-out, my hidden gem is, without a doubt, You Better Know. If you’ve read at least one of the disclaimers at the top of my reviews, you’ll know I’m neurodivergent. I have autism, and I kind of didn’t let myself believe it for a while. But one day I was walking outside and this song came on, and its message was just what I needed to finally let go and let myself stim for the first time. If you don’t have autism, it’s almost impossible to explain the pure rush of joy that stimming (especially after so long repressing it) can bring, and so whenever You Better Know comes up on my playlist, I find myself fighting a huge grin and getting the urge to dance. God, I love this song so much. I’m trying not to smile right now.

Peek-A-Boo: this was the song I considered my favorite Red Velvet single for a while, although One Of These Nights currently takes that trophy. From the start it crackles with an odd, tongue in cheek humor and a “well what do you want from me” shrug. The instrumental seems to pop out of random places, between a twinkling piano, snapping fingers, and some kind of chime that I can’t place, which go far better with the vocals then I would have assumed. I wish they’d pushed the voices more to be honest, because they feel a bit subdued here (and not in an expressive way like in Automatic), besides the last chorus, but otherwise this one still holds up for me. Because hey, who doesn’t want to watch five girls in rainbow dresses kidnap pizza boys from their cabin in the woods?

From the Perfect Velvet album, I have one main stand out. Kingdom Come needs no introduction for ReVeLuvs since it’s already practically required reading for anyone looking to get into the fandom. I admit I was put off from it for a while because it didn’t live up to being treated like the second coming of Christ, but I’ve definitely warmed up to it. It’s so soothing and warm, like a cat curled up by a fireplace, and Red Velvet’s voices come together almost perfectly to set the scene.

Bad Boy takes an even greater shift away from the Red side and towards the Velvet. One would think that a song like this would be boring and barely leave an impact, and they would be completely wrong. Bad Boy possesses a self-assured and smooth R & B flair reminiscent of Taemin’s more subdued tracks, and moves forward with an unhurried strut. It’s often cited as the pinnacle of their Velvet side, and I might have to agree. I don’t have a hidden gem for the Perfect Red Velvet repackage, since it’s only a couple songs.

So this is where we’ll take a break, because I think we’re about halfway through their discography. Like in the BTS review, I’ll leave my final thoughts until next time, and invite you to touch some grass and eat some Doritos.

I’ll see you in a few days for a boy group supplemental and then next weekend for the second part of Red Velvet. Tschüss!

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the-whispers-of-death · 8 months ago

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thinking about mārītes girlfriend rn and how they would even like. happen.

imagining them starting off as just online friends who later realize "oh fuck. we're both in the uk!!!! we should meet up!!!" (much to the hesitance of sylvester) but maybe he ended up being like "fuck it youre 16. youre basically a grown up. go. call me if you need to get a ride back. and dont tell stone i dont need him freaking out, love you have fun" and thats that

imagining them first talking to each other at like maybe 13 or so, so theyve had a *while* to get to know each other. yknow. late night calls and messaging each other constantly

i wanna say that the GF is one of those classic nerdy types, because i love the trope thats nerd x jock (well mārītes not *really* a jock but she does do a lot of sports and loves being outside, while admittedly, not doing the best at school itself)

also until i think of a proper like. english-sounding name for her, she'll just have to stick with being "the girlfriend" because such is the oc creation process at times

i feel like they only actually started dating a few months after they met irl and were like "oh okay you didnt kill me in the 1st meeting. sick. anyways."

i imagine the GF, while being a nerd, if extremely extroverted as well, going hand in fucking hand w mārīte. loves attention and people and affection

oh. and i think shes human. for the most part.

slooowly forming an image of her in my mind and. its just one of those 2014 tumblr hipster outfits. like. side-braid, big round glasses, flannels and skinny ripped jeans. yeah. i feel like that channels whatever the fuck she might be

wait a fucking name just came to me. along with a full on dialogue line from her: "yeah, my names katie, but call me kat. yknow. like, meow :33" and then just a horrified realization that her gf is a cat hybrid, followed by confusing feelings about what just came out of her mouth and if that might offend mārīte (it didnt. shes on the fucking floor, wheezing at that because "what the FUCK do you mean by "yknow like MEOW"???"

anyways. Katie. yeah. last name? shrug emoji,,,

stumped now between making her parents either dead or super rich. hm.. decisions decisions... wait no i just made a decision: she should live in her late-parents home still (thats literally A Fucking Palace) under the care of one of the maids there, whos basically a surrogate mother

i think this derailed a little and is all over the place. but yknow i come up with these things as i type the ask so what else am i expecting lol

also dont tell stone one of his daughters is now dating a basically-millionaire 17 y/o who's parents disappeared under mysterious circumstances. yeah. i feel like hed just about die

~ rusty

It's okay because Stone's other daughter, Saira, posted a picture of herself kissing a mystery woman at a pride parade Stone had no idea she had even gone to and he's freaking out about that.

Mārīte and Saira are just out here making Stone worry.

#tyler's asks #tyler's inbox #tyler answers asks #answering asks #asks #other ocs #oc talk #task force 141 oc #call of duty oc #cod oc #task force 141 oc: stone #call of duty oc: stone #cod oc: stone #rusty anon #:)

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clonebrainrot · 8 months ago

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You know what’s something I really love about tumblr. Sure this exists on other social media sites that don’t delete your posts when you delete your account, but I love how despite your account being gone posts that have been reblogged previously may very well continue to be reblogged years or even a decade after you deactivated your account.

So in a way you live on forever on tumblr. The reason I bring this up is because I just saw a post from one of my old deactivated accounts. And I just find it all so poetic that no matter what your mark on this site lives on long after you have moved on.

Don’t be afraid of reblogging that really old post from 2014 you found. I freaking love it when people reblog my old stuff. It shows me posts that I completely forgot I made.

Like for instance I believe my two most popular posts are my echo messiah post and clone X is soup clone conspiracy (which is canon by the way) and I probably get both of those reblogged a couple times a week if not likes on them. Or on the rare occasion I’ll get my favorite post I have ever made. In which I say “the disaster lineage is really living up to its name” (in reference to Sabine) that one has around 600 notes, but it’s my favorite and it is a timeless classic as it can apply to so many things.

The point is don’t feel weird if you reblog an old post. Whoever made it will probably love it. And hell if it’s old enough chances are they aren’t even around to care.

#star wars #starwars #the bad batch #tbb #tumblr #tumblr community #CBR posts #reblog

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god-has-entered-my-body · 9 months ago

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❤️🥳

Hiii thanks for this!!

❤️ What is your favorite line that you’ve written in a fic?

one of my faves is a small bit from If you're too shy pt 1 (pt 2 coming super soon i promise xx) 'The creak of the bed as he throws himself onto it is incredibly loud. The sound of his zipper is even louder.' I do have a few others, but it's mostly banter i wrote for MPIND. I do have the opening line for IYTS pt 2 that i'm sort of proud of 'They say feeling diminishes over time, sensations are lost to memories, forgotten.' bit cringey now that i read it but its here x Also theres the classic 'I'll show you hobbit feet you fucking cunt' from MPIND's first chapter that i got a lot of laughs on, i did actually giggle a bit whilst imagining that scene. Love u MPIND George you will always be famous.

🥳 Why did you start writing fanfic?

I started writing because i couldn't really find fic that fit my sort of 'niche' preferences anywhere on tumblr or Ao3, so i just decided to write my own thinking people wouldn't really read it? Especially with fics like the first few chapters of MPIND or Facedown/Please be naked, i had thought that it wouldn't really get any attention since a lot of the fics on tumblr feature a more dom Matty, and that just seemed to be the most popular version of him at the time. But i've gotten so much love and support for MPIND and IYTS and how i characterize Matty in both those fics and i'm so grateful for all the positive feedback and compliments, they really do motivate me to keep writing even through some of the worst moments of my life. Writing fic has become my escape, i can just open my glitchy ass 2014 macbook and forget everything in a google doc. Its an outlet of sorts, which i think is a bit obvious with the darker/more serious themes of MPIND. I guess i've also sort of migrated from being terrified to write smut to it being the only thing i really do write, even if it is a bit shit in my eyes, you lot seem to enjoy it xx God this has become a super long rant but i do have a few thing i need to get off my chest and this seems like the opportune moment? I'm sorry for not having a regular post schedule, and its either 4 fics in two days or one every two weeks. Bit wanky, but writers block is real for me too. You're all actually amazing if you read, like, or comment on any of my stuff, it does find its way into my little 'ppl like you (maybe)' foto album and i look at it sometimes if i'm going through a bit of a dry patch. You guys are so so so nice to me even if i've been here since about March, and i've only been writing fic for like a month and a half. Love u guys so much, keep well for me x

#okay this got sort of emo and wanky #soz guys #love u josie youre golden #lena speaks #mpind matty #if youre too shy AU #the 1975 #matty healy #matty healy fanfiction

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thesinglesjukebox · 9 months ago

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TAYLOR SWIFT FT. POST MALONE - "FORTNIGHT"

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As you may have heard, it's been a big couple of weeks (dare we say... [ED. NOTE: WE DO NOT]), and today in particular is a very big day. What day, specifically? It's BEARDO FACETAT DAY! Today we cover music's greatest growlers (and also Taylor Swift).

[5.24]

Taylor Alatorre: Here is what it sounds like to sink fully into a warm bath of your own distilled hype. Many will naturally want to join in, others won't, and much like Post Malone, some of us won't be quite sure what we're doing here either way. Monoculture status: still dead. [5]

Isabel Cole: The one thing I liked about "Look What You Made Me Do" was the shock of hearing Taylor Swift, still possessed of a sweetheart persona despite the fact that she has never made much effort to hide the glint of something sharper in her eye, just come right out and say, unadorned: I don’t like you. After years of waiting, on "Fortnight" Taylor finally returns to a kind of disgust indifferent to its own justification, this time in a song that smartly avoids falling into its own metatextual abyss the way so much of reputation did. Your wife waters flowers, she drones; I want to kill her. The sentiment is shocking, made more so by the jarringness of the not-quite-rhyme (flowers/kill her). The opening verse’s even starker lack of a rhyme scheme suggests both the artist’s desire to discomfit and the narrator’s dissociation. She calls herself a functional alcoholic (well, a former one, although it’s entertainingly ambiguous whether she means formerly an alcoholic or formerly functional), but the track is giving mother’s little helper, a dark fantasia of suburban despair made more, not less, unbearable by the fact that the trap isn’t the picket fence so much as it is the ineradicable knowledge that once, long ago, she had proof that it didn’t have to be like this. At the end of reputation, she wrote, "Hold on to the memories / they will hold on to you." "Fortnight" turns that idea from promise to prophecy, wrenching its bitterness from the unavoidable fact that past joy can’t be outrun any more easily than past sorrow. The official lyrics give the first two lines of the chorus as for a fortnight there we were / forever running to you, indicating she’ll always be reaching for her lost love, but you can hear the line break differently when you listen: for a fortnight there we were forever. The setting is new, but this is classic Swift: happiness fades, but memory lives mercilessly on. By design or by accident, Antonoff’s much-derided featureless electronic wash is the perfect musical backdrop for this story, placing our antiheroine in a musical Levittown. [7]

Hannah Jocelyn: This feels like a non-entity at first: a chill background playlist song from someone whose personality, for better or worse, had always come through. Even something like “Ready for It?” has “Burton to this Taylor” and other wordplay that could only come from Swift. There’s not even the WTFery of other songs on the record, nor the tempo changes and orchestration that make “Smallest Man Who Ever Lived” captivating. Antonoff’s insistence on making everything sound 20 feet away means “it’s just there” is an overstatement. "I love you it's ruining my life" wouldn't pass a hundred notes on 2014 Tumblr. I feel more when Anna Indiana changes “we’ve lost it all” to “I’ve lost it all” than I do when Taylor goes “I wanna kill her.” So I was going to give this a [0], but this piece of shit genuinely grew on me. Taylor and Posty have surprising chemistry, and in its distance, the song finally recalls the '80s torch ballads Antonoff always tries to recreate. Unlike the rest of The Tortured Poets Department, "Fortnight" isn't bogged down in lore; it remembers to be catchy, not the superstar equivalent of someone venting on their Close Friends story. [6]

Alfred Soto: Apart from the novelty of a Yank sending thousands of listeners to Google "fortnight," this opening track is rather spongy as a single -- but then "Anti-Hero" became a genuine radio hit and gained resonance from being one. Maybe she's listening to Elvis Costello: "I was a functioning alcoholic/'Til nobody noticed my new aesthetic" is the sort of clanking couplet he'd cough up for Trust. [5]

Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: Reading lyrics as poetry is a fool's errand even when the artist is practically demanding you do so; all of the critiques of "bad lines" on this album fall into this trap. That being said, "I was a functional alcoholic until nobody noticed my new aesthetic" fails even within the conceit of Taylor's songwriting. It's not that it's incomprehensible per se, but as the second line of a lead single it hits leaden, a collection of perhaps evocative syllables that utterly fails the melodic math test. You can't help but furrow your brow and figure out if there was perhaps a less convoluted way of assembling that. It's inauspicious: given that the Antonoff-Swift production conglomerate seems more and more devoted to creating musical backdrops completely lacking in notable features, you simply must listen to "Fortnight" for the lyrics. Leave aside that I want to write it as "Fortnite" half the time; this is tedious work, a haphazardly set work of serious adult drama that sounds oddly bloodless – Swift has sounded far more unhinged (that's a compliment, to be clear!) on songs where she does not write of a desire to kill. Post Malone is, as he often has been, a saving grace. His harmonies, and especially that counterpoint outro, feel inspired in a way the rest does, helping Swift achieve the Tango in the Night white-collar decadence that she otherwise merely feints at. [4]

Katherine St. Asaph: A demonstration in one single of the lyrical style of The Tortured Poets Department and why I often like it. (The curse continues!) "Your wife waters flowers / I want to kill her" is concise and striking. "I was a functioning alcoholic till no one noticed my new aesthetic" is deadpan and hilarious; it could do numbers online. "You're the reason ... quiet treason," meanwhile, is a self-consciously crafted Classic Taylor Swift couplet, and thus: not good! The arrangement is drowsy and ambivalent in a way that fits the subject matter -- residual feelings that are maybe mutual, maybe not, but drowned too deep beneath years of history to discern the exact angles. Post Malone's voice is extremely pretty in a way that shouldn't fit him. [6]

Nortey Dowuona: Session drummer Sean Hutchinson doesn't appear at the beginning. Taylor's vocals take up so much space in the mix that the sub-Vangelis synths and the programmed kick-snare pattern laid down by Jack Antonoff have to become almost a support system to protect the lyrics. Despite Louis Bell's effors to properly mix both Taylor's soft soprano and Posty's far more powerful voice, they blend together in a detrimental way: Taylor too thin and dull to take hold, Post nearly spectral lest he upset the balance of the mix, the synths so rigid and locked in they can't spill out and swarm your ears -- a frustrating miasma of 1987 pablum. So when Hutchinson's more present, sharp contribution comes in at the second chorus, this time repeated twice, it barely makes a dent: Sean is following the pattern. Serban Ghenea and Bryce Bordone's mix doesn't provide him any glory but simply makes it clearer that this is played by a more present and steady hand. And since both voices have been squeezed tightly by Louis, the additional drum work is fruitless. It feels like a credit more to soak up the blood, not to crack the skull itself. [5]

Wayne Weizhen Zhang: So thoroughly bland that it makes me yearn for the days of Taylor Swift lead singles that were jarringly, appallingly terrible (We'll never forget you, "ME!"). Short aside: who is Post Malone's A&R? The fact that he's on Tortured Poets Department and Cowboy Carter is baffling given his fundamental blankness. [4]

Oliver Maier: What's good about the Blue Nile is that you can't describe any of their songs as "plodding", or "featuring Post Malone". [3]

Andrew Karpan: Something is objectively funny about hiring Post Malone to approximate the idea of Mr. 1975. It’s not great, but it works well enough. On some level, one imagines that someone out there wishes his face could be also used as a prop to try and sell an Amazon remake of Road House. At any rate, Swift makes a remarkably similar use of Malone’s face. It lingers harmoniously in the backend when it finally comes in, humming pleasantly like an old car, or like the past made present again. While nowhere near the most interesting or even the most comic study of Swift’s last relationship contained on the ambient, floating morass of content that it kicks off, “Fortnight” nonetheless persists, ticking along in a kind of styled and graceful camp, toward the mediocrity of middle age. [5]

Anna Suiter: Doing your gardening while your cheating husband watches you music. [7]

Brad Shoup: In a vacuum, “Fortnight” is, well, in a vacuum: suspended and inert. The phrase "in America" drops the ceiling significantly. When used by the workaday pop-rocker, it's lazy; when used by a superstar, it's cynical: a provincial way to give your emotional narrative fake heft. Swift’s so focused on tracing these thick thematic lines off of the story that she neglects to give anything interesting to Posty, who’s kind of a whiz at mixing alcohol and longing. He’s never been in her class as a songwriter, but he’s the better melodicist, and he could have contributed something wry and pining to match the tone of Taylor’s text. But resentful detachment is the move here, an inversion of Gwen Stefani’s “Cool”. [4]

Ian Mathers: Well, this is now the Fortnite song (although they spelled it wrong? weird unforced error there) I'm second-most likely to get stuck in my head, after that one kid's "American Boy" rip. [6]

Mark Sinker: As conscience requires I have a vast essay percolating, a full-on battle of the five armies between cultural historians & critics & reviewers & fans & bystanders, as the vast and ghastly dragon flitters once again above us all -- but before all that… FUNKO POPS LINE IN SWIFTIE EXES REAL AND MADE-UP WHEN [8]

Dave Moore: It hits a [6] easy just for "alcoholic/aesthetic" (I've started taking every criticism of this album and adding "...and that's why it's good!"), but the question is whether there's another point left in it. Pros: I can remember the melody, and Post Malone provides the anonymous duet vocals I haven't heard from Swift since Nathan Chapman was filling in. Cons: Annoying use of "fortnight" and [gestures at discourse]. But like a lot of lyrics on this album, "fortnight" sounds better than it looks, and I've learned to stop worrying and ignore the discourse. [7]

Michael Hong: The best lines -- "I was a functioning alcoholic"; "I wanna kill her" -- are buried under cumbersome lore and clunky metaphors, but that's what makes "Fortnight" feel so real. It's diaristic in its desire to record every feeling, to chase every thought, no matter how lame. The disservice is that despite shattering her American dream, the music still sounds like she's content to live in its image. [4]

Leah Isobel: I guess I feel pity for Taylor, which means the song is doing its job. I'm also grieving a relationship that I loaded with more significance than it deserved, one whose obvious dysfunction was part of its gravitational pull. The narrow melodic and emotional range of "Fortnight" accurately articulates how the afterglow of such a relationship feels -- still intoxicating, maybe even more so because its failure leaves several eminently pullable loose threads. But it doesn't offer any path toward self-awareness or redemption, even as it reaches for the kind of twinkling pop climax her songs practically require. Instead, it promises that Taylor will live in this mythical (probably shitty-in-real-life) fortnight for the rest of her life, or at least the rest of the album cycle. She's doomed to an eternal significance that makes even her soupiest, mushiest songs cultural events. Sucks for her. And us. [3]

[Read, comment and vote on The Singles Jukebox]

#taylor swift #the tortured poets department #post malone #music #pop #pop music #music writing #music reviews #music criticism #the singles jukebox #Youtube

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metalsongoftheday · 11 months ago

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Tuesday, March 5: Queensrÿche, "Breakdown" [ENCORE]

The Today’s Metal Tune tumblr posted its first song March 5, 2014. Amazingly, 10 YEARS LATER we are still here and going strong. A huge THANK YOU to everyone that has followed, liked, reblogged and commented over the past 10 years, this tumblr has been a passion project that took on a life of its own and far exceeded humble expectations, and that is all because so many have listened and gotten in on the fun. To celebrate the past decade, we are revisiting some favorites from the early years. Stay Metal everyone, there’s much more still to come…

Depending on whom you ask, Queensrÿche started sucking either after 1984, 1988, 1991 or 1995. But despite the numerous controversies (and numerous questionable albums) that the band perpetuated since the departure of founding guitarist and primary songwriter Chris DeGarmo in 1998, there is one post-Empire (or post-Promised Land- again, it depends on your point of view) record that deserves revisiting: 1999’s Q2K sank like a stone upon initial release, but in is actually somewhat underrated. Yes, it was another departure from their classic prog-metal sound, and it was most definitely created in reaction to both the musical climate of the day as well as DeGarmo’s leaving. But it was also one of the only times (and definitely the last time until the Todd La Torre era) Queensrÿche just rocked out, without explanation or excuses. And “Breakdown” is the most metallic of the bunch: the guitars storm, swirl and crunch, Geoff Tate wails with conviction (also one of the last times he would stretch his range), and for those who complain about the songs being too direct, Scott Rockenfield’s drumming is nothing if not complex. “Breakdown” and Q2K represent the last time there wasn’t an air of defensiveness about Queensrÿche, and as such both should be appreciated on their own terms.

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collabs-bunny · 1 year ago

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I saw your recent video essay/3 hour ttrpg understanding extravaganza and just. DAMN!

You're an excellent mind to listen to discuss a topic so near and dear to my heart. I'm a ttrpg designer with a couple little games; what's your reading list for ttrpg design as a topic? what books, videos, podcasts etc have shaped how you think? because i love the way you think, and would love to know more

Well hello, thank you for my first tumblr ask of all time. 😅 Congrats on tracking this blog down, and I'm glad you liked the video.

First of all, read Luke, Jared and Snow's blogs. Just read whatever strikes your fancy (https://lukegearing.blot.im/, https://jared.blot.im, nerves.games). Snow's most recent post is actually a reading list, I livestreamed a bunch of Luke's posts, and Jared is Jared. If Jared's ideas and opinions sound declarative, that's his voice. I think he dislikes half-committing to ideas, or couching his thoughts, and he has big opinions, so they can come off uh... standoffish? Unfriendly? But he's a big softie, I love him.

For proper philosophy, read Against Procedurality by Miguel Sicart (blog post: https://gamestudies.org/1103/articles/sicart_ap), and his book "Play Matters." His ideas on appropriation and playfulness have literally changed the way I move about the world in my day-to-day. Not every chapter is a banger, but it's good. The Forms and Fluidity of Play by Thi Nguyen is also great (https://gamephilosophy.org/pcg2014/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/C.-Thi-Nguyen-2014.-The-Forms-and-Fluidity-of-Game-Play-PCG2014.pdf), as is Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature, even if it was written in the 90's. It's very readable, which is important, but also full of excellent ideas.

I'd also recommend um... just reading a lot of adventures. There's a lot of bad ones, but I trust you to form opinions! I'm currently reading Luke Gearing's Wolves Upon The Coast and loving it for different reasons than I loved his adventure The Isle. I'm a big fan of Mothership's instant classics Dead Planet and Pound of Flesh, and I hear the Warden's Manual in the upcoming Mothership boxed set will have some good practical advice. Dread Manse by Micah Anderson was a recent read I liked a lot. I also love/hate/love Orbital Intelligence, but buyer beware: it's a weird as fuck bibliography. XD Dip a toe in as a treat, and treat all of them (including Crapland) at least a little bit seriously.

Also go watch my Zedeck Siew video and pick up a copy of whatever you think sounds coolest. Spy in the House of Eth is a good start, alongside Lorn Song of the Bachelor and of course Reach of the Roach God (which I haven't read yet, but is available at spearwitch.com). This one's a bit sad because of some recent drama, but the books are still good. Oh, and go listen to the Adventure Tourism podcast, and if my episode on Deep Carbon Observatory sounds cool, go read the original (NOT THE REMASTER).

I will say: Don't read any rulebooks for context. Vanilla Game is alright, but people (including me) have said some really Forge-y stuff about Mothership's mechanisms, DCC is huge and its spells aren't especially fun to read, Best Left Buried is... like, I don't want to say anything bad about it because I was (under)paid to edit it, but ehh.

I say that because a lot of those adventures are for """"OSR"""" games, which people say are inherently high-lethality. This is almost always parroted and twisted to be More Forge Bullshit. The rules don't matter. Most of them are D&D clones in lipstick. I recommended adventures (not rulesets) because they're easily appropriated. Just ask how you would use any piece of them at your table, or how you would change them to fit you or your table. It's a good way to play! It's an inherent part of play. I've said it a million times, but my Mothership home game is 2% Alien, 98% Cowboy Bebop, because fuck the rulebook. I don't like the stress and panic rules anymore. Sorry, Sean!

Let me know if this is coherent or helpful at all, and thanks again for the ask. :)

#ttrpg #art agency alienation

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chaewonplzbiteme · 2 years ago

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Three days...

First of all - thank you all a lot! To every reader, every reblogger, every liker, and last but not least, every follower! Thanks for the warm welcome.

Three days is a lot of time. Three revolutions of my home around the poles. My first proper work had a few cycles to traverse the globe and its time zones a few times, to gain impressions and arousing interest.

I'm giving you guys some of my thoughts and behind the scenes.

Publishing was not something I had in my mind when starting any of my two works so far. The 'Jessica x SinB' was rotting away in my drive, only recently have I dusted it off and posted it. 'Lazy Evaluation' was for shits and giggles - I could not stop after adding a joke and another joke. Well, gotta post somewhere at some point.

This blog was close to a start from zero. Two days before I posted 'Lazy Evaluation' - I was still writing the last paragraphs and did not even edit yet - I created the Tumblr and posted an old work of mine. Close to seven years old, I barely even remember how I wrote it. Just a horny night in front of MS Word. That's all I know. One like, one follower. Thank you, @cheezbot and @hasinum! You guys gave me a nice headstart~.

---

Potential spoilers for 'Lazy Evaluation' follow.

I have started Lazy Evaluation on March 11, and finished it on March 31. Twenty days, multiple hours every day (and a LAN party) - a lot longer than a single night for 'Jessica x SinB'. But the journey was a lot of fun, and I experienced a lot of tingly feelings for JiU 😊.

5k words, 30k characters, 145 paragraphs.

This sentence started it all:

Her low hums guided your mouth between her mounds, but your tongue dictated the rhythm of her mellow purrs.

It got me fixated. It set the theme. Bi-directional love making. And the rest of the paragraph followed. Fucking long sentence after this one, lol. I wanted to expand upon this. I knew I needed a mommy with big decent boobs deserving of worship. I thought of Karina or Eunbi first, but I'm afraid I don't know them that well. I don't follow any of their content except for MVs and some stages. JiU is a long lasting love, though, uninterrupted since 2014. I dig every single breath of her. Whopping body. Mine. What a good fit.

How would they start? Help with homework, a frustrating one would suit well. No one understands Monads, countless tutorials and even more memes about the myriads of tutorials. We have our computer science topic. Lazy-by-default evaluation is another concept common from the Haskell programming language, just like Monads. Perfect for procrastination. The fact that lazy-by-default is actually uncommon for programming languages and other technologies, but the de-facto modus operandi for a non-negligible number of humans has been brought to you by the academia gang.

Tortoise and hare is a fable about the hare losing the race due to its own arrogance. Also a heuristic for cycle detection in computer science. Good fit, but better about a race towards the peak, a vicious cycle of pleasure and edging.

A massage would initiate the intercourse. Maybe a hand job before the 69. A cream pie would be delicious. Target is three cum shots - no less. How to transition between positions. Joke about forgotten protection - I doubt Minji would be that careless, add her getting a pack of condoms from her bag (did anyone notice?).

I was already making a lot of jokes, some in mathematics and computer science. I tried to incorporate some classic jokes, too. Not all of them verbatim. The cloud is just someone else’s computer.

Pure functions are side-effect free. A consequence of this property is we can achieve idempotence. A healthy penis also satisfies this property, though, as your boner clearly shows.

I combined the following with a silly 1 + 1 = 3 joke:

A physicist, a biologist and a mathematician sit in a sidewalk cafe, looking at the building across the road. Two people go into the building, then three people come out. Physicist: "This must be a measuring error!" Biologist: "This is proof of procreation!" Mathematician: "If one more person goes into the building, it will be empty!"

Maybe I am the only one laughing. Who cares. You see the result at the cream pie. The sum of all its parts is greater than the whole. I combined with that, too.

About the never-before-solved formula: I consider this to be quite surprising, when we look at the fact that there are more than eight billion humans in the world. It is possible that there has not been sufficient time to process the empirical evidence, given the exponential increase of the population in the last two hundred years – going from one billion to eight billion. I imagine that observing and examining such vast amounts of data to be very time-consuming. Also, not all results of examining the data have been made available to science, most notably by the method of pornographic content consumption.

Some general science and academia jokes. The academic paper structure for the final big joke. An exercise left for the reader. I nearly did a n=1 joke. Given the importance of our research question, I think it would be valuable to increase our sample size to ensure that our findings are robust and reliable. Sequel, anyone?

So much about volcanoes and mountains and hills and mounds and caves. I should have studied geology instead of computer science ;_;. (plot twist: I failed university)

I added one thing and didn't want it to go to waste, like the chocolate, so I added it to another part. Same with some other little details, like Minji's composure. That way I had a common thread (several, actually) running through the story.

Some smaller pop culture references to Lord of the Rings (VERY hard to spot), Attack on Titans, and of course Harry Potter (it's more than the movie title ;) the cum we lose in the chamber of secrets has a way to come back to us in the end, if not always in the way we expect). I had given some thoughts about whether a potential reader should understand every reference I add, given that they also know the source media. My conclusion: No... I will giggle about my hidden jokes alone if I have to. Not everyone has to. Not everyone will. Even if they know the source media.

I also had some goals that I rarely see in male reader fics: "Minji needs to feel good, too." I had a big-ass note hovering over my draft all the time: "What's in it for Minji?" Add stuff about their antics. About what they love about each other.

They were obviously in an existing relationship. Some thoughts about how that came about (not really), how they lived, what their relationship was like before. I almost cried when I wrote the scene with the three words, some tears were already forming actually. It was not a conscious choice to place it that far back, but it did fit well.

A lot of things were a natural consequence, everything leads to the next thing. How do writers say? Have good characters, and the story will write itself. A good cause will lead to a good (and obvious) consequence. No idea if I have good characters, but it all worked out for me. It all feels natural. This is what counts. I'm happy with it.

Again, it was a lot of fun! The rush of adding things into the mixer and see it bloat into something beautiful is quite addicting. From the beginning I could not anticipate the end. It was quite a tremendous journey.

Sadly the following part did not make it - at least verbatim - I was unsatisfied of how much I was jumping from metaphor to metaphor, from one image to a completely different. Had to reduce.

Minji gulped down the snake all the way down, choking on it and feeling it throb at the back of her throat. The other end of the snake did not relent, however, and continued its attack, circling around her nub, unafraid of the secretions her cavern produced in defense, but now even more determined to continue.

I mean, where the fuck would a snake come from. So I changed it to the hare's tail. In hindsight, I maybe should have experimented with hare's paw / foot / whatever it is called in English. You know, the good luck charm.

So many messy thoughts.

Editing and revision makes everything perfect - or at the very least, better. Sometimes. Eventually. Maybe. Who knows? Perfectly fine.

---

Next up, the whopping numbers. These are far beyond the lowest expectations I would ever have for this work, especially given the niche nature of computer science and maths. I cannot say I had any doubts, since I did not expect anything in the first place. Until Tumblr started to summarize the followers for the day.

24h:

72h:

I cannot rationalize these numbers. I have no baseline to relate them to. I can only see: 'big' authors seem to have ~500-1000 notes on a work in days / weeks / months / years / decades. Very muddy numbers. No idea how Tumblr works, every author and every post has different numbers. And I have a fraction of that. In three rotations of the planet.

Thank.

You.

All.

Most of all.

Thank Minji.

Does it tell me it's any good? Who cares, I defined it as finished. I won't ever touch it again. A solution exists. I can go back to sleep.

Maybe it does tell me that some of you are nerds, though - and that I am not alone in being one. Uwu~.

Ok now I shall throw the stats into the bin. A surprise to be sure, a welcome one at that, too. But I intend to write for myself. More than incoherent dreams and thoughts. Ordered, sorted and well-thought out scenarios is a big step up for me. Not synthesized-up and randomized brainstorms. I have ChatGPT my brain for that.

Also rushing for stats make me sick, lol. I'm already engrossed enough with work and the sideways movement of the stock markets. I'm incapable of playing Rainbow Six due to the adrenaline.

---

I have started reading some fics again after those three weeks. And I notice. So. Many. Differences. To other people's work. It is actually a good thing. I don't have much moaning, no "I'm cumming". Way less dialogue, the only conscious difference I was aiming for. Lots of descriptions and images. Volcanoes and burning hot lava in mouths and vaginas, hahaha. Minji gets to be pleasured and cum. Heaven forbid no one think about her!

The world thrives on variety and diversity, so it is actually a good thing to show you guys another way to write smuts, albeit accidentally. Everyone brings something different to the table. We all love each other.

The world needs more breeding fics, especially of the fluffy and romantic variety.

---

Do I have something planned next? Maybe. No promises. How long it will take? Only heaven knows...

Peace, out! ✌️

#hello it's me #introduction #behind the scenes #an yujin coming soon?#only heaven knows #writing experiences #dreamcatcher smut #dreamcatcher fluff #writer thoughts #next smut teaser #kpop smut #kpop fluff

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waitmyturtles · 2 years ago

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Turtles Catches Up With Old GMMTV: Love Sick/Love Sick 2 Edition

[What’s going on here? After joining Tumblr and discovering Thai BLs through KinnPorsche in 2022, I began watching GMMTV’s new offerings -- and realized that I had a lot of history to catch up on, to appreciate the more recent works that I was delving into. From tropes to BL frameworks, what we’re watching now hails from somewhere, and I’m learning about Thai BL's history through what I’m calling the Old GMMTV Challenge (OGMMTVC). Starting with recommendations from @absolutebl on their post regarding how GMMTV is correcting for its mistakes with its shows today, I’ve made an expansive list to get me through a condensed history of essential/classic/significant Thai BLs produced by GMMTV and many other BL studios. My watchlist, pasted below, lists what I’ve watched and what’s upcoming, along with the reviews I’ve written so far. I’ve covered SOTUS so far, but now I’m correcting for chronology, and present to you today my review of Love Sick.]

Well. I climbed the mountain and saw the view from the top. After 48 episodes -- BL edit cuts, mind you, but still, 48 episodes -- I finished Love Sick and Love Sick 2.

Before I dive into the review, I want to meditate on something that kept cropping up for me as I was watching the show. I always say this in my writing, but I’m an #old cishet gal, in my early middle-aged years, and when I was in high school in the States, casual homophobia likely looked different than it does now, or maybe even at the time of Love Sick’s airing in 2014 and 2015.

I’m not sure if young people in high schools do this now... or maybe they do. Maybe I’m clueless and just not watching enough Western and/or cishet content to know. But when I was a teenager in the ‘90s, “gay” was the adjective for everything. "This bagel is gay.” Your handbag was “gay.” Your handwriting was “gay.” The way in which you stapled your papers together could be called “gay” -- I literally heard that in high school, and I still remember it as being one of the dumbest things I had ever heard. And, of course, most doomingly for certain individuals -- many were labeled as “gay,” too.

As I rejected much of the biases and racism that my Indian family operated by when I was growing up -- so I also rejected the nonsensical usage of the word “gay” as an adjective for anything else but someone’s sexuality.

I was a seriously protected, hugely nerdy Indian kid growing up. But I kind of inherently knew that this unconscious/conscious/implicit/explicit/simmering hate for a group of people vis à vis this adjective wasn’t for me. At that time of my youth, I didn’t actually know queer communities. I just didn’t want to be associated with biased people who insisted on seeming like utter idiots via their language against a minority group.

(I’m aware now that “gay” as an adjective is likely being appropriated back by young queer communities, just like the word “queer” itself. I want to clarify that “gay” was NOT being used in a "nice” sense when I was a kid.)

I’m meditating on this because, of course, I watched Love Sick well out of order of my introduction to Thai BLs. I started with KinnPorsche, with The Eclipse, with Bad Buddy, and then began to correct that by watching SOTUS -- all shows that have dealt with homophobia in various ways...or seemingly not at all, in the case of BBS, and to just a touch of an extent in KP between Big and Porsche.

So. I watched Love Sick to learn about Thai BL history. But my mindset is out of order, right? It’s because I’ve already watched many influential shows that carry the influence of Love Sick within them. (As I did in my SOTUS review, I’ll cite @miscellar‘s tremendous analysis of how Bad Buddy was based on Aof Noppharnach’s meta commentary on existing BL frameworks, and I’ll do a lot of comparisons to BBS in this piece, as I’m aware that P’Aof was influenced himself by Love Sick.)

In rewinding my perspective and my mind to set myself up to watch Love Sick: I wanted to be very aware of how this show would deal with casual homophobia among teenagers, and the ever-present question of how it would deal with the question of if the main coupling of Phun and Noh would fall into the “gay for you” category that I discussed in my SOTUS review, and that @absolutebl discusses in this post.

If @absolutebl flagged Love Sick as likely problematic of mistakes that are being corrected for now -- of course, they’re right. The casual homophobia was rampant. The “gay” question was easily squelched, loudly and early by Noh, who clarified throughout the show that he was not, and never would, be gay. And Phun clarifies that as well, later in season 2. Our boys “called it love.”

Bad Buddy dealt with this differently, very obviously. There was no homophobia. Pat likes all genders. Pran will consider liking girls at some point, to Ink’s joy and advice that it’d be “gainful” for Pran to do so.

But. (And I think P’Aof recognized this.) In history, we have to start somewhere. I had to get comfortable in my jibblies to watch this, and be reminded from whence I came, an environment of casual homophobia that very directly led to my deciding to live my life in part as an ally.

It’s unfortunate that I don’t get to read commentary on the regular about these shows from a Thai queer male perspective. (It’s why reviews from the very dear @bengiyo are so important for me to read, from his queer male perspective.) (And I think I need to watch more Soonvijarn.) I want to know, from a Thai queer male perspective, if it was OKAY for Love Sick to depict the casual homophobia that we saw, and if the perspective accepts Noh and Phun’s trajectory as a couple, calling their relationship not gay, but love. And certainly -- maybe that perspective has changed over the course of the airing of BL in Thailand, as expectations and artistic strategies have changed with the progress of time.

Throughout my liveblogging of my watching the show (and I want to take a second here to give a HUGE SHOUT-OUT to the DARLING MUTUALS who commented on my seriously late-night posts: @clairificusrex, @lurkingshan, @nieves-de-sugui, @aliceisathome, and many more, I LOVE YOU ALL, YOU AMAZING STANS!), I expressed a lot of love for Phun and Noh, and for other characters, too, like Yu, Per, and Win. (Yu and Per have a special place in my heart as allies-in-the-making, and Per trying everything to make Win, his BFF, happy -- and recognizing his limits while doing so.)

But now that I’m done with the show...I feel like a line of intimacy wasn’t crossed. Maybe I shouldn’t blame the show for this. The show WASN’T a BL. The show wasn’t SOLELY focused on Phun and Noh. Maybe the line of intimacy that I’m thinking of COULDN’T be achieved in a high school setting in 2014 Thailand.

I really wondered about the length of the show as I was watching it. For the MAJORITY of the second season, I thought the length HELPED the boys grow into their relationship. We really saw shades of gray. We saw shades of emotion, of development, especially from Noh to Phun. We saw Noh grow TREMENDOUSLY, maturely, figuring out his boundaries with lovely Yu. We saw Noh figure out his boundaries with Phun. I thought all of that development was truly lovely, very important to see between two young men, and gorgeous to watch. Captain acted the hell out of it.

At the same time, I think the length of the second second ultimately hurt the endgoal of the revelation of their relationship to their communities and family. To the end of the show, we were hearing that the boys were not gay. I think this was designed as a necessary part of their coming out in their relationship -- because I’m not sure that the airing of Love Sick 2 could have been considered successful at that time if it did NOT include that element, the element of MAKING SURE that the audience was TOLD that the boys were not gay.

And I think -- because I watched things out of order, I’ve watched brilliant shows already correct for these mistakes -- that deflated me just a touch as I wrapped up the series.

As well, up until the VERY end, we saw that the boys were still in a place to consider heterosexual relationships, as in the case of Phun and his friend, Pam, who Noh confused for being a potential interloper. With Phun *not* communicating and clarifying to Noh immediately that Pam had a boyfriend, it set up a moment of real confusion for Noh, as if their already-committed relationship (which they had committed to multiple times already!) was on the rocks, for an interloper of another gender.

While I was watching it, I was confused -- I was wondering why the show needed THIS to close out Phun and Noh’s storyline.

I wonder if it’s because, in 2014, the show could not have ended WITHOUT that question. The boys would be in a relationship now... but in the future, would things “straighten” out? (Of course, years later, we had ReminderS, which I haven’t peeped, but did establish that the guys were still together, as BL continued to be filmed and as attitudes slowly have changed.)

I think that if Love Sick 2 had ended after the pharmacy camp -- I would have felt settled and happy about this show. Phun and Noh ARE darlings, after all. Captain as Noh, his AMAZING ability to demonstrate a teenage kid’s overwhelmed reaction to the world around him so comedically -- it was really perfect. Both White and Captain are fantastic actors (especially as compared to Krist in SOTUS).

But there was something about the ending that gave me the jibbles. As if the show couldn’t just leave the guys alone in their happiness. There HAD to be one more dramatic storyline that wasn’t clear. There HAD to be the clarification that the boys were not gay -- not to their schoolmates, not to Phun’s dad, not to the audience. No way were they gay. Again, I think this was where the length of the second season ultimately hurt this series.

And Ohm’s internalized homophobia as well. The way in which he rejected James, left James in the dust. The way in which things were left not quite clarified between him and Mick, although their relationship was alluded to at the end. (I might have missed some clarifications in the BL edits, but I ain’t going back to the full-length episodes to find out.)

And Earn and Pete. Good LORD, Earn. An “I fucking love you” next to the urinals? Dude. PETE COULD DO SO MUCH BETTER THAN YOU, EARN. (I frankly wanted to see Pete with Yu. Earn was the Thai version of The Situation from Jersey Shore, getting all up in Noh and Phun’s business and trying to break them up. Fucking Earn. SMDH.)

I have complaints. And I can’t help but think... yes, THIS is what Bad Buddy corrected for. THIS is what The Eclipse corrected for. With Kinn being out and out gay, THIS is what KinnPorsche corrected for.

Phun and Noh found their love, which I am desperately happy for. Captain acted the HELL out of Noh -- I could not help but laugh out loud, night after night, at how Noh wiggled his way in and out of situations. He is, in Asian parental parlance, a good boy.

But, as dear @absolutebl meditated on, there were mistakes in this show that, thank goodness, are being corrected by the filmmakers that I have fallen for now. I see what Bad Buddy was doing. Instead of “I’M NOT GAY” -- P’Aof had Pran be gay, and Pat be bi, and Pran consider girls to Ink. That flow of that conversation among Pat/Pran/Ink/Pa -- that was sophisticated stuff. P’Golf had Akk say to his parents, not that he was in love with Ayan -- but that he likes men.

I have previously loved these nuances in Bad Buddy and The Eclipse. Love Sick now makes me WANT THEM, HUNGRILY, as admissions of truth and acceptance.

Do I need characters to be out and out, like Kinn? NO. That’s a person’s business, that’s a character’s business, if they want to define or call themselves gay. I’m not here to tell anyone where to land on the sexuality expression spectrum, that’s not my place. I’m not here to ASK anyone’s preferences. Just live. Pran certainly wasn’t out and out. He loved Pat -- that’s who he loved, he loved Pat, and there was no other nonsense, no other side explanations, no covering up or jibbly clarifying of any other positions. (And Pat’s statement was so simple, too: “I like both genders.” Boom, done, move on, live and LOVE and be happy.)

What was hard for me was the repeated denial of gay throughout Love Sick and Love Sick 2. I just didn’t think the show needed that -- because the love between Phun and Noh could have spoken volumes WITHOUT those statements. But I also get it. I get that the writers of Love Sick likely thought they NEEDED those statements in order to get the dang show aired in the first place, in 2014 Thailand. I get that there wasn’t that paradigm, yet, as leveraged by people like P’Aof, P’Jojo, and P’Golf, that lets love STAND as the STATEMENT ITSELF, à la Bad Buddy and The Eclipse.

I see what Love Sick did to begin setting up a tremendous, TREMENDOUS paradigm of BLs in Thailand. It was simply groundbreaking. And the ads! The advertisers were also making their statements. These boys were drinking and eating the Oishi like there was no tomorrow. That was big for nascent BL and capitalism accepting nascent BL.

But the show wasn’t perfect, not by a long shot. And @absolutebl Sensei -- you nailed it by listing it as one of your three original recommendations for us understanding what GMMTV is doing, NOW, with their progressive and groundbreaking art. I’m glad I watched Love Sick. I’ll get more Phun and Noh when I catch up with ReminderS -- and I’m glad, for me, that Love Sick is over, and that I know that Phun and Noh end up happily together in drama land, hopefully in a place where their cinematic preferences are NOT in control of the fictional communities around them, and the real audiences watching them.

[For those of you who are following, I’m now going to make a purposeful dive into a few shows that cover a number of priorities. I’m going to watch Make It Right, Make It Right 2, and Love By Chance -- all to learn about the works of the very prolific New Siwaj, as recommended to me by @bengiyo. I’ll also be crossing off groundbreaking shows featuring my simpy darlings, Ohm Pawat and Perth Tanapon, who are currently destroying in Double Savage. Finally, with MIR and MIR2, I’ll learning more about the early high school pulps after having watched Love Sick. Here’s the road front and back. I’ll ALWAYS take input if anyone reading thinks that something’s missing on this list!

AND AS ALWAYS: MANY, MANY THANKS TO THE FAM that always comments on these posts and gives me unbelievable feedback: @bengiyo, @shortpplfedup, @respectthepetty, @lurkingshan, @wen-kexing-apologist, @clairificusrex, @nieves-de-sugui, @manogirl, @miscellar, @dribs-and-drabbles, @solitaryandwandering, and anyone that I may have missed! I so appreciate you all, and I LIVE for the conversations we have about these shows. 1) Love Sick and Love Sick 2 (2014 and 2015) 2) SOTUS (2016) (review here) 3) Make It Right (2016) 4) Make It Right 2 (2017) 5) Love By Chance (2018) 6) Kiss Me Again: PeteKao cuts (2018) 7) He’s Coming To Me (2019) 8) Dark Blue Kiss (2019) 9) TharnType (2019) 10) Theory of Love (2019) 11) Until We Meet Again (2019-2020) 12) 2gether (2020) 13) Still 2gether (2020) 14) ITSAY (2020) 15) I Promised You the Moon (2021) 16) Not Me (2021-2022) 17) My School President (2022-2023)]

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