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mia-ugly · 5 years ago

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Breakable Things

Martin is big.

Not in a strapping film-star kind of way. Not tall or broad-shouldered, not a ‘mountain of a man’ or a ‘tall drink of water’ or anything like that.

Just big (a dumb, blunt, smack of a word.)

He was big as a lad, he’s bigger now. He always had the kind of body that inspired too many teachers to push him toward wrestling, football, rugby even (apparently his dad had been involved with the clubs. Apparently he’d been a fair tighthead back in the day, before he left Martin’s mum, and left Martin to gather up the pieces, cutting his fingertips on every one.)

It didn’t take Martin’s teachers or schoolmates long to realize that Martin’s size did not equate to any sort of athletic skill. And once the - inevitable rumours started circulating around Year Seven, well. Any motivation he might have had to be ‘part of a team’ was drained out of him like a tire going flat (that metaphor needs work. Doesn’t really convey the violence, try again.) His motivation left him like the air being knocked from his lungs, shove after hard shove against the lockers.

Martin is strong.

Physically. He doesn’t know why - got it from his father, didn’t he - his wide back, his thick fingers, his solid legs. He took a cricket bat to the face once - ought to have broken his nose, blackened his eyes, but it didn’t. Got in a car accident when he was seventeen, didn’t even crack a rib. Flipped the whole thing into the ditch, and his mum screamed herself hoarse when she found out, but Martin walked away from it. Physically. He walked away.

He doesn’t bruise easily. If he cuts his hand chopping vegetables, it heals quickly. He doesn’t have any scars (he has stretch marks though, all over his stomach and thighs, and for all that he is strong, he’s soft. He’s soft and he knows it, all pudding and poetry and fear, oh, fear most of all. It's pathetic how easy he is, how quickly he caves, rolls over and does whatever's asked of him.

In most situations, anyway. With most people.)

“Why don’t you want me coming with you?”

Jon is in his office, seated in front of that bloody tape recorder as always. The sight of him there is so familiar, like the negatives from a film camera. Like even if Jon wasn’t there, the imprint of him would still linger, white as a ghost against the darkness.

He doesn’t seem surprised to hear Martin’s voice. Neither does he glance up from the desk where he’s shuffling papers, gathering up books. His hands move constantly, restless and bird-boned and Martin is always looking at them, even when he tries not to.

“I don’t want you getting hurt.” Jon’s voice is low, rough with exhaustion, and it makes Martin wince. Makes him want to fuss (when is the last time the man got a decent night's sleep? Someone should bring him a cup of tea, someone should rub his shoulders, someone should do something -

He knows he has a caretaking thing. He knows it’s not - good. And the sharp ones get to him like anything, he wants to win them over in a pathetic, salivating way. It’s a sickness, but -

- but there was a point when it suddenly stopped being about Martin’s Whole Thing, and just started being about Jon.

He’ll talk to someone about it, swear. A professional, even. If the world doesn’t end.)

“It’s fine if you get hurt, though, is it?”

Jon does look up now, and Martin forces himself not to take a step back under the dark-lashed scrutiny. The heavy eyebrows, the shimmer of scars. Sometimes Jon’s skin reminds Martin of the surface of a planet, a rough and distant moon. He wonders how it is that Jon can be so narrow, so small, and still take up so much room in the Archives, and in the world, and in Martin’s big (and soft and so so stupid ) heart.

“It is my job.”

“No. This - this is not your job.” Martin struggles to put the words together in the face of this vast, ridiculous injustice. “Going off to - what? Do battle with some sort of evil, circussy death-cult, that’s not your job . You don’t get paid for that.”

Jon snorts, derisive, and Martin wishes he could be angry. It’d be easier if he was angry with Jon.

But he isn’t.

“Melanie needs you here. And I can’t be - there, thinking about -“ Jon stops. He swallows and looks back down at the scattered papers on his desk. A snowfall of horror stories, laid out neatly on Hammermill Bright White. “Worrying about you.”

(“Leave it, Martin, I’m fine just - leave me alone -” Mum smacks him away with a vein-bruised hand.)

“Because I’ll make a mess of things - is that what you think? I can help you, I want to help you-”

“I will feel better knowing you’re here.”

“And how do you think I’ll feel? Knowing you - you and, um Tim and Daisy - are out risking your lives while I’m sat on my hands, drinking tea, being useless -”

“You aren’t.” Jon’s voice is suddenly loud, as if he’s in pain. He pinches the bridge of his nose, squeezing his eyes shut. “And I don’t - I can’t - you’ll be helpful here. The Institute needs you, and Melanie needs you, and I -”

-don’t, Martin hears.

Though Jon doesn’t say it, Martin hears it.

“Right,” he manages. “All right.”

He should go. He’s going to go. But he lingers for a moment more, committing as much of Jonathan Sims to memory as he can. The angles of him, compact and rigid with anxiety. The fall of hair across his forehead, ink black shot through with grey. Thin pink lines that a blade left below his jaw, a ripple of lacy scar tissue on his hand (and Martin mostly, mostly doesn’t wonder what those scars would feel like against his own skin. On his shoulder or - or sliding down the length of his throat. At the back of his neck, tugging him into a kiss.)

Come back, come back, come fucking back. Martin isn’t religious, never one for church, but it’s as much of a prayer as he’s ever said.

“Is there something else you want?” Jon asks, terse and tired and - for one thoughtless moment he is the Archivist and only the Archivist, and Martin can’t help but gasp out a shocked, “yes.”

Jon knocks a book off the desk. It slams to the floor loud as a gunshot, and Martin flinches.

“Sorry,” he says quickly, “I’m sorry, I -”

“No, I’m - I’m sorry, I wasn’t thinking -”

“It’s fine - I know you didn’t -”

“I would never -”

“But you can.”

There’s a horrible silence, like the moment after the tape recorder shuts off, statement ends. Martin feels sick to his stomach and Jon looks like - like -

He doesn’t know what Jon looks like. Maybe that’s why he keeps talking.

“You can ask me. What I - what I want.” Heat is rushing to his face, a blush that feels like thorns. Jon just stares at him, and this was a bad, bad idea. It’s obvious, isn’t it? Jon doesn’t even need to ask the question, probably knows the whole awful story just by looking at him. “If you wanted.”

When Jon says nothing, just keeps staring, Martin tries desperately to double back.

“Never mind, that was -” He flaps his hands a bit, moving towards the door. His shoulders hunch, an old defense mechanism, useless body trying to make itself look as harmless as possible. Trying to make itself so small it’s beyond notice (it never works.) “I shouldn’t have. I can’t believe I - just - be safe. All right? That’s all I -”

“Martin -”

“That was - stupid, such a - I’m sorry, I only -”

“-what do you want?”

The words are spoken quietly. Barely above a whisper. But Martin doesn’t need to hear them - his whole body hears them, and suddenly every syllable feels golden in his mouth. Saying it out loud isn’t frightening or humiliating, it’s easy. Answering the Archivist is like falling asleep in a patch of sun-warmed grass, or gasping for air after holding your breath underwater.

“I want you to come back.” It’s honey dripping off his tongue. “I want you to come back for me. And I want the world not to end, and I want to know what your hair feels like, whether it’s soft or coarse and whether I can tell the difference between the black parts and the silvery parts just by touching them.”

Jon is absolutely frozen behind his desk. He might not even be breathing, but that’s okay; Martin can’t remember why anyone needs to breathe.

“And I want to help you. And the others. I want to matter. And I want Sasha to be okay, and I want Tim to be okay, and I want Elias to finally face some fucking consequences for once. I want to take you on holiday and - and watch you while you sleep so you know you don’t have to be afraid. I want to wake you up if you have nightmares and make you tea in the morning and bake things for you, and - and I want to kiss you, even if it’s just once. Only once, just so I know, and only if you want me to. That’s what I want.”

The sweetness ends the moment the last word leaves his mouth. Suddenly the honey is cloying and acrid, suddenly his heart is unsteady with embarrassment, skipping beats like he’s just had a shot of adrenaline. Martin chokes on a breath and slams his eyes shut against the spinning room.

“Fuck.” His voice cracks on the word, insult to injury, and he claps a hand over his mouth. “Oh God - I’m - oh God. That was -” He barely remembers what he said, which is the only thing keeping him upright at the moment. He just knows it was soft, pathetically soft. Even his fantasies are as weak as his jawline. “I’m going to - go, I’ll go. I shouldn’t have -”

“W-wait.”

Martin doesn’t want to open his eyes. But he does. Just in time to see Jonathan Sims stand up. Start to walk around the desk.

And Jon is not big. Or strong, physically. Martin knows a bit about anatomy, took a couple art classes, was always fascinated by the bones of things. As Jon steps closer, Martin can only see the breakable things about him. Collarbones, fingers, bridge of his nose. What’s that bone in the arm that everyone’s always breaking?

Humerus.

Ulna.

Jon is not strong, and he is scarred, and he is small and fragile and God he is the bravest person Martin’s ever met.

“Martin, you -” Jon stops in front of him and Martin looks down, gaze almost level with the top of Jon’s head. “You can ask me. What - what I want.”

He’s shaking, Martin can see it - and it makes him realize that he’s shaking too. He barely manages the “What -” before he forgets how to say the rest, forgets how words work (but Jon, Jon is brave.)

“I think - I would like -” Jon reaches for Martin’s hand, and lifts it to his mouth. Presses a dry kiss right in the centre of Martin’s palm.

It’s a ruining sort of softness, and Martin’s big (physically) and strong (physically) but somehow Jon knows where his weaknesses are - the loose dragonscale, the slipped disc.

(And of course, after this the world will almost end (but not quite.) After this, there will be Elias and Martin’s humiliating tears over a statement he knew damn well, a beholding that came as no surprise to anyone.

After this Jon will die.

Almost. Not quite.)

But now: Jon is murmuring, “I think -” as he leans up to kiss Martin (and his warm mouth is shocking and brief, a knife sliding home.)

But now: Jon is still shaking when their lips part, and Martin’s hands are on either side of his face, tips of his fingers settled lightly in Jon's hair (it’s softer than anything, as it turns out, and the silvery parts are softest of all.)

Their foreheads press together, both of them breathing harder than one kiss should warrant. And Martin doesn’t say any of those other things he wants, any of the white-hot words he’s scratched down on paper or typed into the notes app. He doesn’t say anything about the shape of Jon’s shoulder-blades through that thin grey t-shirt he wears, doesn’t bring up any metaphors about fading light or seaglass or breakable things that are also strangely beautiful.

Because what good is poetry at the end of the world?

“Be careful,” Martin says instead (and Jon won’t be.)

“Come back,” he says (and Jon isn’t going to. Not for a long, long time).

And hours later, standing in that empty office, Martin will see the lighter that Jon left on his desk. He will notice the black handful of ashes in the rubbish bin, and wonder what Jon was burning.

And Martin is soft. People-pleasing and pathetic and terribly, terribly in love.

But Jonathan Sims kissed him once (once) and for a moment, in that office, with a small blue flame leaping in his hand -

Martin is not afraid.

#the magnus archives #jonmartin #trying to remember how this writing thing goes #some consensual beholding between bros #Season 3 episode 117 #missing scene #homophobia cw #bullying cw

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bao3bei4 · 4 years ago

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kpop music videos that gave their fans sexual brainworms

OR accidental fetish pop and its fringe fanbase: meditations on gendered desire

large warning here: i am someone who has been into kpop for the past 10 years. however, i have always been an extremely casual fan. i do write fic, but not rpf. if any of that makes you not want to hear me talk about kpop rpf (or you don’t want to hear about it in general), please keep moving.

anyway, obviously pop is corporate, soulless, and manufactured. but sometimes some truly bizarre shit gets past the committees and destroys a generation. these are their stories.

the video that started this is all is got7’s just right, released july 10th, 2015.

yes that’s all 7 members of got7 (one is out of frame) shrunken down for your viewing pleasure. they live in your room and tell you you’re just right.

this sheer fetish power of this video is nerfed only by how utterly sexless it is.

they’re styled like and dance like this. it’s a totally unironic sendup of the seminal work that preceded it by four years, “what makes you beautiful” by the white kpop group “one direction.” the chaste energy of the whole thing makes you legitimately wonder if the good people at jyp have just never heard of microphilia. (during a dramatic reading of this piece, here a friend interjected seriously, “i think it’s korean culture not to talk about things like this, fetishes in the workplace.”)

it’s for the best, honestly, though because the actress in the music video is lee ja in, who was 11 when the video was shot. considering that the members themselves ranged in age from 18-23 at the time, i think it’s actually very impressive that we only have to cancel one.

you receive absolutely no prizes for guessing that it’s jackson wang we’re sending to social justice prison. why’d he do this? no one asked.

at any rate, got7 fans, or “gans” (they actually call themselves igot7s which is too twee for me), have much to think about here: all 7 very small members of got7 sneaking into their room, possibly weird age play, and jackson wang eating a very large cake.

let’s see what they actually did.

twitter was actually very tame. the most charged thing i found was (unsurprisingly) from a bts fan (“ban”). i don’t actually know what it means, but i think it means something.

so, of course, i turned to the internet’s last bastion of free speech, where you can say whatever the fuck you want and receive cheers, or as the kids say, “kudos.” that is, i read fanfiction.

for those of you who don’t know your herstory, i started my journey at Asianfanfics.com, where, at the time of writing, there were 12,067 got7 stories. i want to start this by saying that i think feminism won, because someone was paying real human dollars to advertise their irene/wendy fanfiction on a banner ad, which is quite possibly a win for women for everywhere.

anyway, Asianfanfics.com’s search engine sucks ass (i kept on finding stories about different combinations of bts members worrying about their weight and being reassured by another member that were entitled “just right”), so i decided to look through all got7 stories written between july 2015 and december 2015.

but, alas, not a single got7 microphilia fic to be found.

also, some genre commentary while i’m here: i think the stories i respect the most are the “[y/n] is a ordinary girl who’s assigned to be got7’s manager! can she make them into superstars? as sparks begin to fly, can she keep it professional?” like fuck yeah that sounds like a kickass dating sim. it almost definitely already is one. i salute all the teens around the world for buying into the fantasy of dating a boy band member that they themselves sell you.

however, i don’t think i respect the “[member a] and [member b] are mafia/jocks and nerds/college students/high schoolers” concepts. in my opinion, the whole fantasy of boy band member is their personas, their hidden real personalities, their celebrity, and the show business setting. find a different intellectual property if you wanna write about school. i even respect the “yugyeom drank girl juice [not estrogen] and turned into a sexy girl” story more, because at least it knows exactly what it wants, and also because they’re all still boy band members. well, band members. shout out to yugyeom.

so, anyway, i looked elsewhere. at the time of writing, archive of our own only had 11,645 got7 stories, but it does have a better search, so it effectively has more. as an aside, i think it’s so funny, and mildly disorienting at first, that archive of our own separates the “music & bands” section from the “celebrities & real people” section. boy band members aren’t real people.

the first problem i encountered is that only 20 or so stories were written within a year of just right’s release. absolute cringe gans. don’t you care about your boys? there were zero stories tagged “vore” or “microphilia” either. stories containing the word “tiny” that were rated either “explicit” or “mature” were all normal (“normal”) size fetishization rather than, you know, just right.

however, i learned my lesson from twitter. i realized that what had happened was that watching this video had created sleeper agents, just waiting for their activation phrase. that activation phrase? bangtan boys. and yeah, lo and behold, there was one! unfortunately (fortunately?) it had nothing to do with got7, let alone just right, so i’m not going to talk about it.

basically what i learned is that this video may have actually been very normal, and my brain has just been destroyed by being too online at a young age.

however, there are plenty more videos in this genre. i present to you exo wolf, a banger from may 30th, 2013. i say banger, because in a comedic inversion, it’s actually fucking terrible.

this video is pretty self-explanatory in terms of why it might induce certain responses.

let’s get the formalities out of the way. this video, the member who’s getting cancelled is kai. he has braids in this video :/

also skating on thin ice: xiumin and chen. guys what was up with the whole exo-m thing? like, we’re gonna have a cpop subgroup, but it’s going to be part chinese members and part korean members that we’ll give a chinese name? unsurprisingly, the three exo members who have departed from the group are all chinese. they weren’t able to stand the microaggressions probably. but xiumin and chen remain uncancelled as an official chinese apology for five thousand of years of on-and-off invasions of korea. sorry guys that was kinda fucked up. our bad!

anyway, there are basically three avenues for exo fans to take: 1) humans with wolfish characters (usually wolf pack dynamics, which even wolves themselves don’t fucking use so i think all of you should shut up. the real omega here is your brain), 2) werewolves (duh), and 3) wolves with human characteristics (i.e. standard furry fare).

exo themselves let all these possibilities exist at the same time, superimposing them over each other, which is very woke and egalitarian of them. let’s see what the people decided. awoo.

Asianfanfics dot com had many stories in this vein. i feel very validated that this time i was able to correctly predict a fetish. that said, briefly returning to my earlier comment regarding alternate universes: it’s intense psychic whiplash reading about these vampires and werewolves, and going okay okay luhan is a vampire this that whatever, and then seeing the actual real performance photos the author attaches at the bottom of each chapter. bro i forgot these were actual people.... it breaks immersion so bad... i’m sorry, i just can’t believe that any of these dancing boys are having weird vampire sex with wings or whatever.

archive of our own also had many stories in this vein. and i think there are some important difference between the two sites worth talking about.

first of all, i think the higher engagement rate of archive of our own really enables some of the authors to get super bold. it makes Asianfanfics.com seem a little quaint, actually. like the wordcounts are waaay longer, for one. it’s uncommon for a story hosted on Asianfanfics.com to be more than a few thousand words long (most of them could easily be published in the new yorker), whereas some of these archive of our own people have written full length novels about if the members of exo were werewolves. i guess it’s just intensely demoralizing for the aff.com crew to get, like, three comments per story.

the second big difference is that i’m noticing more common themes between the ao3 crew’s writing. like stan intertextuality, or plagiarism, or whatever, but they seem to be implicitly engaging with each other’s characterizations, storylines, and tropes. i think it is because they probably all follow each other on twitter. (i have been active on twitter for three weeks now so i am an expert on fanfiction twitter.)

anyway, like not that i am a particularly big gan (cannot even list all the members), but these people seem to have reached a very specific consensus on how jackson wang, for instance, would react in a variety of situations that really surprises me? if i were to sit down and write a got7 story, i think the fuckboitude, the douchebaggery is a big part of his charm. not to be nationalist or anything, but for god’s sake, he’s from hong kong. but these people have him as very sensitive, lots of protective instincts. not that i understood what anyone on aff.com was doing with his character either, but they did all seem to be doing different things. “kudos” to that, i guess.

but: exo. wolf. i searched the “wolves” tag. this filtered the list down from 33459 stories to 52 stories. and the “wolves” tag was very different from the aff.com “wolf” tag. for the most part, aff.com liked stories where a member was a wolf (usually shapeshifting), feral boy, lots of y/n, lots of y/n dating a feral boy who is secretly a wolf.

ao3 really, really, really likes alpha/beta/omega stories. sorting by the most popular stories, only five on the first page weren’t a/b/o. and one of them was a cis f!baekhyun story, so i think the intended effect was communicated. anyway, let’s talk about some of the themes.

first of all, i’m disappointed. today’s bonus cancellation is of ao3 “wolves” writers. why the fuck are you drawing so heavily from european wolves?? there are wolves in asia!! you don’t need to keep giving their packs and ranks weird latin names. i will kill you. i hate italy. korea literally has a native wolf. i hate all of you!!! if you want to write caucasian wolves go watch that dumbass cw show!!!! my god.

the second theme (the first one was white supremacy) is that no one wants to be a wolf who fucks. i think that we need a sex positivity movement, or something, for omega rights. like, are all of you doing okay? you’re queering misogyny by inventing new genders to oppress. another level to “no one wants to be a wolf...” is the “who fucks” part. there are so many consent issues. and not even in like, a sexy intentional way? in a “i genuinely do not think this author understands how their writing comes off” way. unfortunately i am sensitive to untagged sexual coercion, and there was a lot of that.

at any rate, the aff.com wolves were at peace with being wolves, very self-actualized. the ao3 wolves know that every minute they spend alive on this bitch of an earth is suffering, and also sex.

the third theme is the evolution of y/n. y/n, who, in a startlingly woke move for aff.com, is almost always korean, is a girl main character stumbling into love, boy bands, and wolves (i think it’s because aff.com is oldschool kpop fandom, so therefore heavily asian itself in userbase). but y/n is not the main character in ao3 stories. she is the straight best friend. in what i think is a hilarious move, ao3 authors invert the gay best friend paradigm to give the gay main character a straight girl as best friend. she usually calls him “a gay,” she has lots of thoughts on boys, and she knows his sexuality better than he does and before he does. (sidebar: if all the men are gay, and all the women are straight...)

there’s a really fun twist to this, though, because the main character is always a self-insert in fanfiction. but where older fanfiction like aff.com was at peace with this and literalize it via y/n shenanigans, modern fic writers who haven’t finished distangling their complicated relationship with wanting to be a man who loves other men instead simply imbue their main character with their essence. a little voodoo doll sehun, with a lock of y/n hair.

this creates a deeply ambivalent relationship with gender in these stories. the main character is usually an omega, but one who resents being an omega. their body and its parts is usually described, if at all, as ostensibly intersex (except more offensively), but in practice, these discourses inscribe a trans body. (nb: i think cis writers approach this in a really fucked up fetishizing way, but i hope by this point we know that that goes without saying) it’s incredibly straightforward to read this, and see the underlying desires and fears in a heady cocktail of unfiltered writing that’s deeply confessional. you know when freud had people say whatever the fuck they wanted and figured they’d eventually free associate into releasing their subconscious into reality? yeah.

okay, and while we’re on the topic, let’s talk f(x) nu abo, released on may 4th, 2010.

this is a blitzy, maximalist, amped up dance hit that even has its own applause and cheers built in. it’s so fucking annoying, and i love it.

this song is on here because the second most popular kpop a/b/o story on ao3 is called “nu abo” except it’s about bts. that’s offensive enough in its own right. write something about f(x) (702 works). when will women win the right to have their own self-lubricating holes.

anyway, even though f(x) is probably innocent in all of this, i’m still cancelling amber liu.

for queerbaiting. who told her to look like ruby rose but hot? and for what? i’m also cancelling her for racism, but that wasn’t in this video.

moving on to a double feature: vixx voodoo doll and vixx chained up, released november 19, 2013 and november 9, 2015 respectively. this is because while voodoo doll is more formative, i think the fans who write fanfiction today got into kpop more recently, so we are casting a wide net.

anyway, voodoo doll is jam packed with weird pseudo-medical imagery, blood, vivisection, bondage, puppet shit, femdom, sharps, piercings, asphyxiation, dollification, stabbing/penetration metaphors, and a really sick and catchy dance. god that looks like the list of tags on the a/b/o wolf stories.

for this song, we’re cancelling you, for being way too into this song when you were 13.

vixx voodoo doll made me goth i guess! insert that pic of the your music saved me sign, except it saved me from getting into emo or pop punk probably.

chained up, comparatively, is much more tame. the only thing of note about it is that there are around 10 completely different chokers and choker looks the members wear in this music video. also they’re singing about being chained up, but that seemed a bit obvious.

we could argue that voodoo doll is gay while chained up is gay (derogatory); that voodoo doll is queer while chained up is gay; that chained up is a sensitive masterpiece of omega4omega sexuality. but we’re not going to.

we’re going to talk about what voodoo doll fanfiction was and was not. first, Aff.com had plenty of it. however, i was extremely disappointed to see that much of it did not hew to the spirit of vixx voodoo doll. my god, the voodoo doll becoming the one preying upon you disgusts me. the fantasy of the voodoo doll is that of absolute power. the idea that the doll itself has agency? instantly breaks the fantasy. i’m even not into voodoo dolls and i’m offended.

i also don’t think it’s part of the voodoo doll fantasy to release the doll. the only story on there that involved Y/N kidnapping vixx members like in the music video was unavailable because the author deactivated their account. come back qxeen what did you see.

i think this got off track, actually, in that i was mostly wondering why these people imprinted differently onto vixx voodoo doll than i did. like i don’t think you’re supposed to actually like straightforwardly absorb the morals and aesthetics of music videos like it’s propaganda. however, it’s more entertaining if you do. i hope ao3 doesn’t let me down.

out of the then 5932 works in the vixx fandom (the least out of every group so far, excluding f(x) because they’re women), 59 of them included the word “voodoo” somewhere. that’s 1%. i legitimately can’t tell if that’s high or not.

after some more cursory reading through the first page of popular results, my big takeaway is that people watched that video and wanted to be tortured and enslaved? but not, like, in a sexy way where the torturing is the point, the way where the point is to suffer bravely and beautifully, to endure the world’s harms like jesus on the cross, and then to fall into the arms of a beautiful boy who may or may not be the one hurting you in the first place.

there’s a certain predictability to these fantasies. like it’s not even masochism, which would be fun at least, it’s literally just like the desire to be beautiful, even as you suffer. and i do find that a little boring. (but, i mean, you can’t help being a woman!)

sidebar: on chained up. what’s interesting about chained up, is that most of the then 38 “chained up” works (likely because the video has no storyline) are about the members fucking during chained up promotions. no one’s ever actually chained up, but whatever. it’s fine. it’s fine!

anyway, here, more than ever, the nature of desire is stripped bare. i’ve written before [elsewhere in the unreleased tshirt cinematic universe] on how kpop boys are, through fandom, re-formed as white, or more strongly, i guess, blank slates. it’s really interesting to me how so much of this dynamic of projection is enabled by the fact that they’re asian men. they’re infantilized, feminized vessels; they’re seductive, but childlike, oblivious to their own charms, so nonthreatening; they have uncontrollable desires for sex, they’re scared of sex. and above all else, white women submit themselves to them, insert themselves into them. basically kpop fans tend to rework old school yellow peril and emasculation fantasies to reenact their own desires, often white, often cishet on them.

what i am saying is that there’s another thesis about forced feminization and its racialized subtext in here. obviously gender is a racialized construct to begin with, but like it’s fascinating to argue that when white women remake asian men according to their own desires, that is, into themselves, they (hopefully) unintentionally echo these old fears about the sexual order.

it illuminates, it seems, the underlying dynamic in the denigration of asian men, which is of course the fear of miscegenation. now, my breathtaking ability to make everything about me aside, miscegenation is interesting because it presents a racial synthesis, beginning to collapse and trouble the artificial designations of purity. so we make asian men into white women, and end up with an unsettling hybrid. i’m sure this has deep implications for me personally.

but i think we already knew that quite a few of these people had yellow fever, so let’s talk about the gender dialectic at play. basically, the above dynamic, of making men into women (whether literally, in body; or subjectively, in mind; or even relationally, as they are objectified into passive vessels for your desire) coexists with the ostensibly converse dynamic, in which the straight women desires to be a gay man. these aren’t necessarily in conflict: it could easily be that these are different writers writing different stories, that both are ways of expressing discontent with existing in a raced, gendered body, or even that the end product of both is the same.

it’s been a while without a picture. all of you now have the legal right to hunt and kill me for making a d&g joke.

anyway, what i want to talk about is how these two fantasies can coexist. that by making a man into yourself, you can speak on your own desire in a passive way. my normal interest is analyzing forced masc fantasies (albeit in chinese opera lol), and they bear little to no resemblance to this kind of fantasy. this kind offers plausible deniability, of course, because wanting things is embarrassing. but also the fantasy isn’t about wanting to be a man, it’s about having no choice but to be a failed one. the gender pessimism running through these stories is palpable. basically andrea long chu wants what wolf fanfiction writers know: everyone is an omega, and everyone hates it.

at any rate, this racialized dynamic is one that i wasn’t sure how to bring up throughout this piece, mainly because there is no definitive way for me to tell the race of any individual writer, beyond just like the clear and present vibes that i receive. but i think it structures a lot of the fantasies contained in this essay. (i felt more comfortable bringing up the gendered dynamic, because it was fairly trivial to find out the current gender of the person writing each story i was reading.)

obviously we should return to the specter haunting this conversation: the very much alive david eng. i think this sort of argument is familiar to readers of racial castration, especially his chapter on m. butterfly. btw sorry for mentioning that play 2 out of 3 posts on this blog. i have problems.

let’s talk about the parallel imagery between the depiction of gallimard’s final speech and the fanfiction i’ve described above. in it, gallimard makes himself into his own dream woman, dressing in yellowface and robes, the costume of puccini’s original madame butterfly. and he laments his lost love:

there is a vision of the orient that i have. of slender women in chong sams and kimonos who die for the love of unworthy foreign devils. who are born and raised to be the perfect women. who take whatever punishment we give them, and bounce back, strengthened by love, unconditionally.

in that, i see the self insert, and i see the sufferer of vixx voodoo fic. the fantasy that gallimard has about asian women is repeated, this time about asian men and a helpless identification with them. and on some level, gallimard’s women do have something very compelling to identify with: they suggest that there’s a way to endure white male violence without sacrifice, and even more potently, to enjoy it on some level.

but onward to the titular racial castration. eng argues that gallimard’s wilful ignorance of song’s true gender is a psychic castration -- song’s masculinity is diminished so that his own can be enhanced within their relationship. this, eng believes, acts out “richard fung’s contention that in western imaginary ‘asian and anus are conflated.’” this process stabilizes the relationship between the asian man and the white woman: they occupy the same place within the sexual dyad.

this is, i think, why some people are addicted to writing from the bottom’s perspective. again -- not implying that irl bottoms don’t exist or that bottoms are psychically castrated lol -- but rather that you can fantasize about this ideal asian man that you can come to embody. in kpop rpf, rather than it being between a white man and an asian man (unless someone’s started writing chad future fic), it’s between two asian men. so this transformation is performed. whiteness is always intruding and so i think eng is helpful here to making it visible again.

this essay isn’t a callout or actual cancellation or anything like that, i do wanna be clear. i guess i just like talking about fantasies, even the embarrassing ones, and where they come from. i think oftentimes in fandom spaces, we write a lot of stories off as idfic, and i think virtually every single one of the stories i referenced to write this fairly uncontroversially fall into that category. but i think calling something an “id” something or the other naturalizes the satisfaction it gives as purely instinctual and unconscious, when i do think there are deeper narratives at play. while i didn’t ever actually reference the base here (sorry), i do think it’s worth talking about how real world power shapes & maintains the superstructure, and thereby our fantasies.

anyway in conclusion, maybe i was the one with sexual brainworms the whole time.

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