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the activity on this post is like a bat signal. the reverberations out there have made their way to me. the soap guys are so back (robert returned from 5 years in prison and dramatically crashed aaron’s wedding to stop him from marrying robert’s murderer brother)

so whats the story with these emmerdale guys? and hypothetically if someone wanted to get into them where would they start?

i am so glad you asked!! this turned into a whole ass primer, but you did ask!!

the good news is that the emmerdale guys (aaron dingle and robert sudgen) share a truly epic love story that spans four years, three redemption arcs, a lot of character development, and a found family at the end. the BAD news is that there is umm a lot of stuff to wade through if you want the full experience.

emmerdale is a british soap, which if you’re not familiar with the format means that it airs five days a week all year long. tbh it’s an entirely different medium than television - there are no seasons, no hiatuses, no finales, just episode after episode every day, like a weird parallel universe we get a window into! it also has been airing since the 60s, and some of the characters have been on the show for 20+ years, which means that there is a lot of backstory and history and context that you simply will not and probably do not need to understand. you have to be ready for some very wild plotty stuff and a lot of melodrama. also people are allowed to be ugly and have bad hair and everyone works a blue collar job and knows everyone else’s business and spends all their time in the village pub. embrace the medium!

aaron and roberts story does have some of that over the top plot and melodrama, but it also has some genuinely affecting emotional depth, especially from 2016-now. neither of them start out as good people, largely due to the extreme trauma of their respective childhoods. aaron takes out his self esteem issues on himself, robert takes out his self esteem issues on other people. this means that at first, things are umm pretty toxic and bad. robert is cheating on his fiancee! the writers take a couple things to the absolute extreme! but pretty much anyone can be forgiven for anything in soap land, so we get some very satisfying redemption arcs out of it. i will not spoil the rest unless someone asks me to, but the founding tenets of their eventual relationship:

robert would do literally anything for aaron, after spending his whole life until he met him only looking out for himself

aaron never stops loving robert, even when every other person in the whole village hates him

robert is always the first person to notice when aaron is struggling, and he always tries his very hardest to help him (usually in deeply misguided fucked up ways <3) 

both of them but especially aaron have a lot of physical and emotional scars, and there is a scene where robert runs his fingers over aaron’s scars while aaron is lying in a hospital bed and tells him that he will love him forever

danny miller (aaron) can cry on cue. and he does. a lot!

if you’re intrigued, do not try to go watch the whole show! there are thousands of episodes and you will be fully lost. luckily, people have uploaded their storylines to youtube to make it easy for us.

both characters come from important emmerdale families, which means that they’ve been on the show for ages, but aaron and robert have existed in their current iterations with their current actors since 2009 and 2014 respectively. this means you have a few options for entry points:

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DAYS OF BEING WILD dir. Wong Kar-wai, 1990

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quick and easy tips

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ok concert thoughts, cc @whentherewerebicycles @alexenglish:

we were down on the floor, near the side stage, real close (shout out to the numbered queue system for standing floor - we showed up 1.25 hours before the show started and got to be this close!!). it was unlike any floor experience i've ever had: this crowd was nearly entirely still, and nearly entirely silent, everyone near us holding their phones up and watching through them. for the whole show, no exaggeration, the cameras not lowered for one single second.

obviously this was one show, in one city, in one crowd, and is hardly representative of boyband culture everywhere. part of it is certainly a different concert culture in the country (although the vibe wasn't necessarily respectful, there was a lot of shoving and phones battling for airspace). but it does point towards some widespread post-pandemic crowd and fan patterns. this was a young crowd (probably mostly 16-22) and that age group has felt the effects of the pandemic & modern technology culture in ways we have not yet fully seen the depths of - the agoraphobia, the experience of social life and pleasure through the internet, the fear of judgment in public places under the panopticon of tiktok, etc etc. crowd behaviour is also just soooo powerful, and its impossibly difficult to be loud in a quiet crowd, or move in a still crowd.

imo the whole crux of a boyband crowd is the opportunity for girls (etc) to be uninhibited. to scream your love out! to have your voice just one of so many, your deepest joys and desires sanctioned by virtue of sharing them, your identity swallowed up. absolution! liberation! you can't be uninhibited when you are watching through a phone, but... but the moment of witnessing the boyband is so fleeting, and so vastly outweighed by the time you spend watching them through screens, how can you resist wanting to keep it.

this boyband in particular is one that you dance and scream to - closer to the energy of a one direction than many kpop groups. much less focus on precise dance & spectacle, much more on joy and energy. the liberation on stage was even more notable with such a quiet crowd - boys tearing down the runway, running at full speed, jumping with their whole bodies, singing with their whole bodies. its exultant!! they do two encores!! they have a live band TEARING it up! how can you NOT dance! and by the end of the show, they had coaxed some energy out of the crowd - those who had been hanging back and dancing came and joined the stage crowd, and things got louder, bigger, less inhibited. the boys came down off the stage to the barricade, taking photos with peoples phones and running in circles, and the crowd jostled and clamoured to be close, so frantic that i could only see snatches of their faces through it. it's certainly not that the crowd didn't care. it's just that they were - what, too fixated on capturing it? too afraid to show how they felt?

anyways i've been keeping an eye on concert videos from other city stops and i do think that this was a notably small and timid crowd - others are audibly louder. but without fail, the first handful of rows are filled with people with their phones out, visibly avoiding moving out of fear of ruining their footage. sorry to be old and shaming the youth, but it makes me sad! i want liberation for them!

went on my boyband pilgrimage, saw so many beautiful things, witnessed my boys from sooooo close so crazy close, experienced soul enrichment!

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went on my boyband pilgrimage, saw so many beautiful things, witnessed my boys from sooooo close so crazy close, experienced soul enrichment!

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Dianne Doan & Manny Jacinto photographed by EMMA, September 2022.

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Decision to Leave (2022) dir. Park Chan Wook

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[“We come to gender as supplicants, all of us. And many of us fail the litmus test of decency because our modes of gender presentation are too vulgar, too louche, or genderfucked in such a way that we disrupt the “natural attitude” because we fail to enact and achieve a certain verisimilitude of normative, White maleness or femaleness. Failing this litmus test means we are repeatedly refused, turned away in moments of our imploring recognition.

I’d wager that all trans people carry within them the memory of such refusals, even if they no longer actively shape our everyday engagements. This means that we all recognize gender as a morally loaded laborious process. It is work. And our labor is alienated, insofar as we don’t own what we produce and we rely on someone else to determine its value and worth. This means that we labor under conditions we don’t choose, conditions that many of us actively want to destroy. But we also understand, intimately, that the concept of autonomy that underwrites romantic myths of the insurrectionary subject can’t hold.

Gender recognition is sustained by a web of forces that we don’t control. Because we rely on others for recognition, we understand how selfhood is given through such forms of recognition. Because, when such recognition is withheld, we intimately sense that we are being relegated to the position of the monstrous, simultaneously both more and less than human. Because we exert agency in determining our forms of life and flesh, but that agency is always only one part of a much broader assembly into which our flesh—and its possibilities—are grafted.”]

hil malatino, trans care, 2020

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HAND ON MY HEART. HAND ON MY STUPID HEART

ross gay / susan sontag / unknown / richard siken / warsan shire / lana del ray / tturing / hera lindsay bird / richard siken

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i love boybands because i am compelled by found family, but also transience (fleeting youth, fame/fan adoration that feels limitless but has a destined ending), and also the selfish determination to strive for something bigger than yourself, and also the likewise fleeting and brief time where men can have deep and intense emotional relationships with each other because of the circumstances of their job.

anyways, recently, i’ve been deeply caught up in some concepts new and old: failure, fame/expectation/influence, artistic ambition/hubris, and umm hm. how to say this one succinctly. the experience of living as a person who is in some way “othered” - due to queerness or a mental health struggle or etc, having some inescapable thing that distinguishes you and that dictates how people perceive/react to you. the way that sometimes identity matters much less than… place in the world. and especially how people who are gender nonconforming inhabit a space thats often unnamed, that the person themself may not fully be congnizant of, that might be walked into unconsciously or consciously but that essentially always comes from a deep vital place and that always alters forever their position in the social world. and thats why i’m obsessed with controversial washed up idol kwan jiyong aka gdragon

fascinating how fandom is not just an escape, but often a space for us to project our fears/longings, or safely cling to something we lack in our lives, or explore something with a modicum of control and self-centeredness. i’ve found that my fandom interests do tend to parallel or reflect my life events and/or the themes and concepts that are troubling or interesting me

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fascinating how fandom is not just an escape, but often a space for us to project our fears/longings, or safely cling to something we lack in our lives, or explore something with a modicum of control and self-centeredness. i’ve found that my fandom interests do tend to parallel or reflect my life events and/or the themes and concepts that are troubling or interesting me

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I was never good at this body. 

There was always something in me so anxious to crawl out.

— kiki nicole, from NOBODY’S DAUGHTER

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shutting in. 

heather havrilesky // “last one up”, paul oxborough // from a letter to theo van gogh, vincent van gogh // on the beach at night alone (2017), dir. sang-soo hong // shauna niequist

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“Worry less about what you make — that will mostly look after itself, and is to some extent beyond your control, and perhaps even none of your business — and devote yourself to nourishing this animating spirit. Bring all your enthusiasm to bear on the development of that good and essential force. This is done by a commitment to the creative act itself. Each time you tend to that ingenious spark it grows stronger, and sets afire the ordinary gifts of the imagination. The more dedication you show to the process, the better the work, and the greater your gift to the world. Apply yourself fully to the task, let go of the outcome, and your true voice will appear. You’ll see. It can be no other way.”

— Nick Cave