#again the duality of man (my captions) is STRONG

[toasty-owl-arts]

pov: ur the core and ur about to get ur ass kicked by a polycule of candy colored magical girls

[igottiny]

Ateez reaction to finding your thirst blog. *18+*

They are playing around online while away for work when they stumble across your blog. They take it as a hint.

Seonghwa - He couldn’t believe he found your blog, or that you even had one in the first place. But there in your bio was a picture of you and the cat you shared complete with your name and the cat’s name. There was no mistaking that it was you and that you never got over his ab flashes during the Inception era even years later. You never acted like this at home. A smirk adorned his face when he got an idea.

Pulling out his phone he dialed your number for a video call. When you answered, he stared directly at the camera, his smirk still in place, and said, “Baby, you never needed to run an entire blog to see my abs when all you had to do was ask. I’ll be home tomorrow and you can touch and play to your little hearts desire.” 

Hongjoong - One of your friends had sent him the link cause they were getting tired of hearing, and reading, about how you loved how dominant his stage persona was and that you wanted be on the receiving end of that passion. He nearly choked on his drink while reading this in your own words. “He’s such a soft hearted leader but imagine what it would be like to be railed by him while he’s in his stage persona headspace. Yummy,” the most recent post read.

Once he was finally able to breath properly again he took a screen shot. If you wanted to play this game, he could play too. He was so gentle with the most precious person in his life but clearly his baby needed to learn a lesson. Sending the screenshot to you through text he also stated, “It looks like you need to be put in line baby. Be good for me and have yourself ready on our bed for when I get home tomorrow.”

Yunho - Finding your tumblr was never supposed to happen. He was just bored while waiting for the music show they were on to start filming their performance. However, reading that you really liked when he wore a suit cause it made him look more mature like a CEO, took him by surprise. Both of you always had so much fun acting like over grown kids that he didn’t think that you would go for such a serious business type. He was now worried over loosing you to someone more mature. That is until you found the post referring to how he could go from a cute hyper puppy to a badass boss in two seconds or less as the “ultimate duality.” He would just have to “barrow” one of the costume suits for this comeback home.

Walking through the door in his borrowed suit had you feeling some kind of way. “Be a good pet and fetch me that toy you like baby.” You scurried off to do as you were told so fast that it made him break character a giggle like a child. Good thing you didn’t see that part.

Yeosang - He knew you were on Tumblr a lot; you said your blog was doing well. He had plenty of time to kill while they repaired an issue with the set and he was going to find it. He was not ready for what he found. You loved his bad boy aesthetic whenever he wore leather and did the eye brow raise thing he does. Not only that but you wanted that lace blindfold to make a comeback so he could watch you work him with your hands and mouth through it as you found out how low is voice actually got. He had a hard time focusing on anything else the rest of the two days they were away filming. It’s not unusual for him to be one of the quieter members of the group, but your unabashed want had him literally speechless. He didn’t know he wanted the same thing till you pointed it out in your posts.

He returned home before you got off work later that week lace blindfold in hand. He found his tightest leather pants and the matching leather jacket. He needed this, now. You got home to find him leaning against the left wall of the hyeongwan leading into the living space; blindfold still in hand and a smirk darkening his already heated gaze. 

“A little birdie told me that you needed to be put to work on me,” he said pausing for a moment to take in your stunned expression. “Well jagi, what are you waiting for?”

San - He knew you liked his arms and hands with how you always wanted them wrapped around you while at home. However, this was a new level of like. Every possible close up that featured him in a sleeveless shirt and a band around his biceps as well as every close up of his hands —including the crotch grabs— was gif’ed and individually posted on your blog. Some even captioned as his ultimate talent as those hips don’t lie. It’s just a shame he was out of town for promotions for the next couple of days. So instead he sends you a snap chat of him flexing with the caption, “As soon as I get home I’ll lift you up in my arms and show you how talented my hands really are.”

Mingi - He personally didn’t find your blog. Wooyoung did and showed him cause he thought it was funny. All that focus on his hands and what it meant when a man had large hands as well as him being a tree you wanted to climb has Wooyoung teasing him while he blushed. Scrolling through and his blush depend. You really just wanted to have your way with him didn’t you? He pulled on the collar of the turtle neck sweater he had on; did they turn up the heat? There’s no way he is going to admit to Wooyoung that this worked for him a little too well.

When he got home he found you sitting on the bed typing away on your laptop.

“You working on that little thirst blog of yours baby?” You stared at him wide eyed with bated breath.

“Well then baby, why don’t you climb on up and find out just how large I actually am?”

Wooyoung - It is no secret that he loves to be praised. So when he came across your blog praising the ground he walked on and saying how you just wanted to worship every single inch of his body during a break in filming, he was thrilled. He needed to make this happen. He would have preferred it to be now but that wasn’t possible. The group was on location filming for their new music video.

Not long after he got home, he was leaning against your side on the couch, phone in hand, wanting to show you something. Bringing up your own blog he smirks stating, “If you want to talk about treating me like a king, I do hope you can walk the walk with that mouth of yours jagi.”

Jongho - Your blog showed up as a recommended blog when he searched his own tags on Tumblr. Your icon was you so there was no mistaking it. He turned red before he could even scroll down two times. The posted gifs of him smacking Seonghwa and Wooyoungs’ asses with the caption “I wish I could trade places with them and have him punish me like that too” sending a very distinct message. Then there was a gif of him punching open a watermelon with the caption “Considering the strength it takes to do this, I wonder if he’d be strong enough to hold me up against the wall as he railed me?” He hid his face in his hands. He couldn’t handle this. What killed him most of all was the picture of him in glasses and your caption calling him a professor who’s class you would gladly misbehave in.

If you wanted to be punished that bad then he didn’t really have much of a choice now did he? You were posting this stuff on a public blog and that just wouldn’t do. As soon as the group got back to Seoul from their filming location he made a beeline for home. He found you in the kitchen putting away groceries when he backed you up against the counter.

“What makes you think you can publish that kind of filth so publicly baby? I think you need to learn your lesson that this behavior will not be tolerated again. Now turn around.”

[mageinabarrel]

The future may not be so dark after all.

I’ve entertained myself lately with pondering on what the predominant “theme” of the BLAME! film is. The movie, I feel, invites interpretation through a collection of equally valid binaries: life and death, wonder and fear, striving to survive and giving up, faith and doubt, tension and release, possession and need, light and darkness, hope and despair. Together, they form a complex matrix, each pair flowing into the others so that at times they are entirely indistinguishable. However, as is my privilege as viewer and critic, I choose to prioritize one set over the others—hope and despair.

Near the end of the film, there’s a rather unremarkable shot that unexpectedly captivated me. In it, the primary viewpoint character of the film, a young girl named Zuru, is shown in an unexceptional mid-length shot, looking off to the right of the screen. In context, Zuru is watching as the people of her recently destroyed village begin to make preparation to leave their haven of hundreds of years. But, Zuru, having just come through a life-or-death battle with the Safeguard robots tasked with eliminating all humans, is not crying. Instead, her face is set in a confident neutral. And in that moment I thought, “Ah. She’s their future.”

The face of the future.

In many ways, BLAME! seems to be building to that specific moment, which is perhaps an absurd interpretation of a film in which the hero of the story is so obviously Killy, the wandering human searching for the bearers of the Net Terminal gene. But when I saw Zuru in that moment, I immediately recalled the first time we see her face—when she complies with Killy’s demand that she and her friends remove their helmets. That shot, which is the opening image of this article, shows a Zuru teary-eyed with fear, grief, and fading adrenaline, yet still in control of herself enough to make eye contact with her mysterious savior and maintain an expression of resolute defiance. Her will to live is unmistakable.

When it comes to life and death as themes, I’m typically fond of works that treat them as elemental—as a kind of unavoidable, imposing realities of a grounded world. Masahiro Ando’s Sword of the Stranger is perhaps the best example in anime of this for me, its archetypal story, tactile world, and plentiful combat allowing it to distill the act of living down to the fundamental, animal instinct of staying alive. BLAME! has very little of that kind of natural feeling to it, even when it comes to its human characters. The City is a monstrosity of artificiality, the Electro-Fishers literal fugitives in an locale of existence that has rejected them—a truth the audience understands instinctively thanks to the way shot after shot portrays original creator Tsutomu Nihei’s architectural terrors (Nihei served as Creative Consultant for the film) as a hungry abyss of uncontrolled metal, piping, and wires.

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That detachment from a more recognizable, organic environment is why I found myself attracted to the more abstract duality of hope and despair in BLAME!, rather than the more visceral options like life and death. Immediate threats like Safeguard attacks are dispersed throughout the film, with the lingering chafe of worries over incoming, yet still distant starvation insufficient to fill in the gaps. What remains is time. Time to think, to plan… to hope?

When Zuru and her friends sneak out of the village at the start of the film, they are driven by a need for food and a belief that they, with their skills and their desire to help, will be successful in finding a new source of food for their village. From one perspective, it might seem that they are animated by desperation, but the confidence with which Zuru leads her company gives the impression not of hopelessness, but of hope. They trust in themselves and in the potential for achieving their goal. And so they pursue that hope.

This hope—the first kind: which one seizes for oneself—is met with despair.

If hope is answered by despair—in the form of a dried up sludge pipe and three of Zuru’s friends dead—then it’s reasonable to ask the question: Was their hope misguided? Were they wrong to hope?

Had things descended into despair following the disaster, BLAME!‘s answer might be rightfully seen as “yes.” But Killy appears, the lone blue light (a color of hope echoed by the pale azure glow of the barrier that keeps the Safeguard from the village and Cibo’s encounter with the Authority) on his equipment a relief against the red destruction left by his weapon. And in doing so, he sets the story on a new track towards a hope that builds on what Zuru’s efforts have begun. Later, as the village begins its journey to a new home, the leader of the village will thank Zuru for setting it all into motion.

The first progression in that motion is a step from out of the mysterious shades of the past, and requires something different of Zuru and the others than her venture out into the City. Killy’s discovery of Cibo and her subsequent offer to help the villagers by means of the automated factory demands trust in the unknown hope she offers—a hope that must contend with doubt and despair. This second hope—hope not understood, but grasped in fiath—is spearheaded by Oyassan’s strong desire to find a means of survival for his village and underlined by Zuru’s refusal to stand aside in her village’s time of need.

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I rather like Cibo’s initial visage, a horrifically degraded remainder of a human being as a symbol for this kind of hope in the unknown. She is so foreign to the Elector-Fishers (a “scientist”), so unlike them with her long age and her vast understanding of this fearsome world and the potential for control she offers. Killy’s strength is of the obvious, easily trusted kind. It is not like that with Cibo or the automated factory.

These unknowns find their foils beside the fire, in the comfort of tradition. “Remember this,” Oyassan says to Zuru. “When Electro-Fishers camp, we always light a fire like this and sleep beside it. It’s the way we���ve always done it.” The fireside scene is a release from the tension of the unknown, and somehow the familiarity brings hope. As the Electro-Fishers remember the past, it acknowledges their present—once the future of their past—and in so doing promises them a future as well.

Once, others sat around the fire. Now we follow in their footsteps, just as those who come after us will follow in ours. Tradition acknowledges the past while setting out a foundation for the future. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Cibo and her automated factory, the legends of the Net Terminal Gene that Oyassan remembers despite not understanding them, and promises of reconnecting to Netsphere are not the only hopes that the Electro-Fishers are unable to be certain of. There’s also the man who brought these hopes to them: Killy himself. But uncertainty need not always be accompanied by doubt.

Killy is mysterious, but he’s also simple. His goal is as pure and clear as stated: Find the Net Terminal Gene—the salvation of humankind. And as I said before, his strength is easily parseable. Zuru witnesses his effortless destruction of the Safeguard and his ability to walk past Watchtowers without attracting their attention, and he demonstrates repeatedly both his ability to protect himself and his absolute (single-minded, even) commitment to the fulfillment of his mission.

This simplicity is key. Despite the secrets that surround him (although many are revealed throughout the movie), Killy is easy to trust. His ability to enact power in a fundamentally disempowering world and the clarity of his purpose distance him from the other characters, making him into something more than just a man—so that when he parts ways with the villagers at the end of the film, his final line is not merely a statement of purpose… but a promise of hope.

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That hope—the hope you place in another—loops back around to the same hope that Zuru represents: the hope for the future.

Hope is an intrinsically forward-looking thing. Although it may draw its power from action, the unknown, the familiar, the past, or another person, hope always exists for things that have not yet happened. It occurred to me as I was watching the final scene of BLAME! that Zuru’s granddaughter’s ending monologue seems rather similar to something you might hear at the end of a superhero movie.

“A long time has passed, but there’s no sign of the city functions returning to normal. I suppose no one with the Net Terminal Gene has been found yet. But I believe. I know that somewhere, he’s still out there in that endless city… continuing his search.”

—Zuru’s granddaughter

“But I believe.” That is something far more powerful than the cliché that the hero who once saved the earth will return again when it is in need, because there is no certainty, no proof. There is no “reason” to believe, yet belief persists. The Net Terminal Gene may not exist, but still Killy searches—and still the Electro-Fishers wait. That’s faith. After the Electro-Fishers moved to their new village, Zuru became their leader in “the new land.” She became the future she strove to find for her people. Faith begets hope, which in turn begets the future.

The world has not changed at the end of BLAME! But someday, it might.

The future may not be so dark after all. The future may not be so dark after all.