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trashlie · 1 year

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Hiii!

I read your post about i love yoo and i am so impresed by how smart you are that you see all of this details and all hidden symbols in this webtoon, like wow. Thats why i wanted to ask you what kind of books and movies do you like to watch? Do you have any books or authors that you think may helped you be so good at reading through characters mind and their body language so well? Sorry for any English mistakes im still learning :P

Nonny you are too kind, you flatter me, really! <3

Honestly - and this feels embarrassing to admit - I haven't really read books in a LONG time. I went from being a really voracious reader and writer to unchecked ADHD manifesting as depression really wrecking my interest in things and my focus/attention span. I'm slowly trying to get back into it! I finally got myself a library card so I can try digging back in! Part of how I got into webtoons at all is because it was much easier for me to plough my way through those, although funny enough, so many webtoons I read have NOTHING on the subtext present in I Love Yoo so.... lol. Sometimes you just need light reads, you know?

But really, I think a lot of how I read and view ILY came from the community itself. Webtoon.Theory set the bar and so many of the theories we as a community hold on to (The Chess Theory, what it means when characters' eyes are closed, the Yoshi theory/Rand was adopted into the Hirahara family) came from their own analyses and theories, and to be fair, I think a lot of how I now interpret ILY is based heavily in those formations. Would I ever have thought anything of what characters mean when their eyes are closed on my own? Frankly, I doubt it. I read a lot of theories! When I first got REALLY, REALLY deep into ILY, like on the this is on my mind 24/7 obsession level, I had a LOT of time on my hands. Thanks to a user on tumblr, I'd discovered the reddit and that there were deep theories about ILY! At that time I definitely had some thoughts of my own about Yui but I had only recently re-read it so I was till, yknow. Normal about it at the time.

But once I found the sub-reddit I dived in deep! I went through lots of old posts and read them and their comments, taking in theories and applying it to my own interpretations and held on to things I agreed with. I think once you have that kind of "base foundation" it's easy for you to start looking for things, too. I'm a particularly emotional reader, so I think I tune into emotions a LOT - often in lieu of other little details or notes. @youuuimeanmee writes a lot of analyses I wouldn't ordinarily think of myself - like I never considered applying Nol and Shinae's score in DDR to being a signal that he's always a step ahead of her, but when I read that I was like NO WAY THAT MAKES SO MUCH SENSE!

Talking with the community is really what does it for me! A lot of the times when I get on here to throw together my big "thought dumps/reactions" whatever my posts about the new episodes are lol it's usually after I've been on reddit talking back and forth with people, sharing our ideas and merging them into something far more cohesive than my initial first reactions. I fill in the gaps of my own reactions - oh yeah this little detail I didn't pick up on, oh i interpreted that this way but I like your idea you might be on to something. Sometimes the sheer process of just talking about an episode for a few hours is like.... idk when you marinate meat - the process just brings things to the surface, helps you see things you missed or look at it a new way. And in that process, it means I'm reading and re-reading the episode multiple times. My initial first reaction NEVER has anything on my re-reads because now that you know what's coming you can focus on the other details, take in the expressions and the lighting and what is this body language meant to imply what does this expression look like?

But also - I mean it when I call it the ILY brainrot lmao like it is on my mind ALL the time! I'll be working and it's just there at the back of my mind, me mulling over things. (Lately I've been really fascinated by the way quimchee depicts really emotional moments for Nol by hiding his eyes. SO OFTEN when he is "breaking" we don't see his eyes, just his mouth, and something about that just really STRIKES me. How is it so much more emotional and impactful when we don't see his eyes?! idk but I'm obsessed with that detail lol)

Not to really sell myself out but lmao when I got REALLY deep into ILY and discovered all those theories and peoples' ideas and expectations I did like.... 2 more re-reads? lmaoooooo look I was holed up in bed after surgery with a LOT of time on my hands lol the first reread I did was me just keeping in mind the theories - especially the eyes closed theory - and paying attention to the details, to the body language, to all the things unsaid. You get this a LOT from Kousuke and Rand, I think! And taking these details in helped me reshape how I saw a lot of these characters! The second re-read I did was with emotional blinders - reading all these scenes with Nol and Shinae and with Kousuke and Shinae without any romantic implication and looking for what else it could glean about their characters and their dynamics. Something that confused me for some time was what the Kousuke and Nol face off early in ILY, when they all 3 went to dinner together and they were taking off their jackets meant. So many people wanted to apply a romantic lens to it but that never felt right, but at the time I just didn't understand what else it could be. But as we get to see more into Kousuke and we get glimpses at how deep his paranoia runs, the way he's been comparing himself to Nol - competing with him, to some extent - it starts to make more sense. Of course it never had anything to do with Shinae and instead everything to do with them and the bad blood between them, Kousuke always trying to undermine Nol at every opportunity and always frustrated when Nol defies expectations, etc etc.

I've lost track of how many times I've reread ILY but that's the other thing. Rereads, especially as you learn more in the present story, always help illuminate things! I remember doing a reread and picking up that there was something weird about how Alyssa reacted to Kousuke, showing more interest/concern in him, but once I was thinking about that, I noticed it was even weirder than I'd originally thought, with Yui bringing her up to Kousuke a couple times. As you pick up on things, going back you're able to see the foreshadowing, the foundation laid down, and I think it helps you going forward, because you're becoming more and more familiar with what signs look like, how they get hidden in plain sight, how they apply to what we know about the story so far.

So all that to say - it's not necessarily that the media I take in has prepared me nearly so much as engaging with the community and really consuming the thoughts and ideas of the community was my biggest help! But doing a LOT of re-reads and learning to read into the characters and what they say - or what they don't say - with what we know about them helps, too.

This one is harder to really describe, and I guess it's one of those things that over time you start to pick up as you better understand the characters and their motivations and fears? For instance, when it came to Yui and Kousuke, it had become very clear in that flashback of Kousuke's when he met Nol, that he had been manipulated a LOT in his life - that Yui was soooo deft with her manipulation that it didn't come across looking like what it was. There were still a lot of readers at the time defending her, insisting that she's done everything out of love for him and genuinely trying to do what she thought was best for him. It was hard to try to demonstrate that Yui talking badly about Rand and his affair in Kousuke's hearing range as absolutely a calculated move, that undermining Rand at every turn was calculated to strain the relationship but ALSO make him rely more on her and took advantage of Rand's frequent absence. Things like that! And now we can see plainly that it really was that all along. Even recently she has swapped out the gift Rand gave Kousuke to make him feel like Rand doesn't even try, has twisted words to imply Rand cares more about Nol that he had no time to wait around for Kousuke (despite yknow that whole conversation that had while Kousuke was out being her chasing him out but okay!) and of course, the tea. The drugging.

But yeah, in the end, I think the most important thing is to read other peoples' thoughts and theories - and I don't mean the webtoons comments sections because YIKES ON BIKES lmao - and try to apply it to how you see and interpret things and how could it alter things. Go back and reread scenes and try to examine in them in a different way. What could this scene mean if you remove an romantic expectation? What could this scene mean if you take Kousuke at face value? Actually Kousuke is such a good practice of this because lmao he's a pretty bluntly honest character, but he very OFTEN feels like he's trying to convince himself of things that on a subconscious level aren't so. That whole club arc is just full of it!

One last point I have is that a lot of ILY is written to subvert popular, but bad lol, tropes from other media but especially shoujo manga and boy did I read a lot of that, too. When you know the tropes and the cliches, it's easier to see when it's being subverted. For instance this current arc is bringing to life the "why does my kokoro go dokidoki" cliche of a female lead not being able to identify her romantic feelings for another character and instead just being naive. This is often used to draw out the realization and confessions and has a tendency to get REALLY frustrating because often there's no reason for the misunderstanding! A character will be doing some romantic gesture to her and she'll be like gee golly why do I feel this way? You can see it being subverted with Shinae because a. she has had NO time to process anything that's happened this entire night let alone the shift between her and Nol and b. she lacks not only romantic experience herself but EVEN IN HER LIFE. And knowing that this is a subversion, it leads us to assume that this won't be drawn out and made into some kind of tense mess, and that we can expect to see this resolve much sooner than we might think.

This was also especially true for Kousuke, who was framed very much like the first lead of a romance, where the cold, cruel, rich man secretly has a heart of gold - or discovers a heart of gold - when he comes to meet the plain but bright, unassuming normal girl who somehow gets under his skin. There was a lot of expectation that we'd see that - especially when Kousuke had that moment of kindness and placed his hand over Shinae's to provide her comfort. I think a lot of readers took this as a sign that yes, we are going to see more of Kousuke's soft underbelly - but it was incredibly subverted in that it turns out the asshole with a heart of gold is, in fact, an asshole and lacks the heart of gold, and we watch him crumble slowly over the course of the story, gradually revealing just how truly awful he can be.

Trope subversion of course relies on you having an understanding of popular tropes and cliches and things that get used a plot device rather than to actually improve the writing/characers/story and quimchee does it a LOT, and SOOOO well! This also tangentially leads to being able to pick up on plot devices like foiling and parallels. I feel like parallels are my catnip and I'm ALWAYS pouncing on them when they show up lol. This sounds like so much but again I think it's one of those things where you start to see it once you become aware of it, which once again ties back to digging into the community and sharing our ideas with each other!

I wish I could say that I had read lots of books that had made me better at reading into things but frankly, in school, I was not a super critical reader. I did well, sure, but I was no webtoon.theories breaking ground with theories that shaped the entire way we view the story on a whole lol. I've mostly become a more critical reader as I've gotten older and come to understand people a little better, had more life experiences that gave me better insight to things I may not have understood as well when I was 18 compared to now, haha! I truly mean it when I say I owe it all to the fandom on a whole. If I wasn't constantly interacting with the community and going back and forth with our interpretations and thoughts and ideas I would not have nearly as much insight to share with you guys! <3

(Also do not feel bad about your English, it's good!)

#ILY Brainrot #tagging this because it's tangentially related lol #at the end of the day i would not be able to articulate my thoughts and ideas if not for me obsessively reading through the ILY community #if not for all the theories and the conversations #especially the conversations!

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transmascissues · 8 months

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today, my coworkers’ refusal to see me as a man put one of our patients in a position where they felt unsafe for the third time. i’ve been at this job for less than two months total. i don’t even care about getting misgendered anymore, i just want the people we’re supposed to be taking care of to feel comfortable around me.

i work at a hospital where we have to supervise our patients in a lot of vulnerable situations. there are safeguarding rules in place for certain things that male employees aren’t allowed to be present for when it comes to female patients. and yet, the people training me and telling me what to do have repeatedly put me in situations where i’ve been forced to do things that the female patients aren’t comfortable with me doing. and because they have repeatedly failed to teach me the rules for doing my job as a man, i have no way of knowing when i’m crossing one of those lines unless one of the patients tells me.

i’ve had to watch a victim of SA stare at me in abject terror as my coworkers asked her to strip naked with me still in the room. it took several minutes for her to even be able to speak enough to ask if i could leave the room. i found out after that she broke down crying the moment i walked out. my biggest regret is that i didn’t realize what was happening fast enough to leave before she ever had to say something, because she shouldn’t have had to say it. i never should’ve been allowed in the room in the first place, because that’s not something male employees are supposed to be present for. but i didn’t know that yet, because i was training and i thought surely, they wouldn’t train me to do something that directly violated their own safeguarding rules. that moment was the first time, and it’s haunted me ever since, but it wasn’t the last time. not only did it happen for the third time today — it almost happened for the fourth, and would have if someone hadn’t spoken up to say they should pick someone else. i care for these people so deeply, it’s why i took this job, and i’m so tired of hearing the fear in their voices when they have to ask me not to do something i never should’ve been told to do.

i’m very used to the personal discomfort of being misgendered. i willingly deal with it a lot at work as well as in other situations, not because i’m in the closet (at this point in my medical transition that would be impossible), but because it’s such a frequent occurrence with my coworkers that we would never get anything done if i took the time to correct them every time. but to see it get to the point of causing such visceral discomfort in other people? people i’m supposed to be taking care of and keeping safe? that’s something else entirely, and i’m fucking exhausted.

and after all of that, some of them still look at me like i have two heads when they tell me what to do and i say “i can’t do that, only female employees can” because i’m learning now. clearly i’m already seen as a man by our patients, but my coworkers would still rather put them in an unsafe situation than just train me as a man.

#to be clear it’s four different things they’ve asked me to do that im not supposed to #as soon as i find out about one rule they ask me to violate a different one that i didn’t know about #i will never ever forget that girl’s face and i’ll never stop being angry for her #for all three of them but especially her #i hate my coworkers for a million different reasons #the patients are the only reason i didn’t quit this job after the first day #i just want to do right by them and sometimes it feels like i’m the only one working there who does #it kills me because the patients who know im trans have been so great about it too #most of them know nothing about trans people but they’re so willing to learn and so respectful and we’ve had such great conversations #they’re getting fucked over by someone else’s transphobia when they themselves don’t have a single transphobic bone in their bodies #i hate this place because i care about the people in it too much to stand by the way it treats them and it’s killing me #transandrophobia #transandromisia #transmisandry #virilmisia #virilphobia #anti transmasculinity #transmascphobia

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