#to bop the little festering ulcers

[jmdbjk]

Kim Taehyung

Yes, just finished watching Tae’s vlog where all he did was drive around and listen to music. Got a few things to say...

From the moment he sat his butt down in that car, I was totally mesmerized, totally enamored, 100% DOWN for him! When he is just Kim Taehyung he is just a normal dude jamming to his tunes while driving down the highway with the window down on an incredibly beautiful day. JUST LIKE US. Except he can call his dentist and without any notice whatsoever, zip in and get a chipped tooth fixed. Yeah, that’s not just like us but anyway. 

Just to get some perspective on his drive, this is one of the points I noticed:

How far he drove past the tunnels? Who knows, but the driving time between the middle of Seoul, say, the HYBE building for instance, and somewhere past the Semiwon Garden is probably an hour and a half or so? We don’t know where he began, all that is just a wild guess, but the tunnels are recognizable.

His choice of music is outstanding. Going from Troye Sivan to Bing Crosby...please hahahahaha!!! So eclectic. And when Procol Harum started playing, that’s when I totally lost it ...THAT. IS. MY. JAM!!! Well, before BTS that was my jam. That makes me sound much older than I am but I can’t deny my rock music roots. It is what it is. 

The person who writes the captions...seriously...I am coming for your job. You better watch your back. You are me, I am you. Especially when you pointed out the bird poo on the railing. If I was a YouTube reactor, I would be hitting stop and rewatching that moment and going berserk repeatedly...so just be glad I’m into writing this Tumblr blog and not that.

Just driving around, stopping for a snack then lunch, probably charming the shit out of the restaurant people, stopping for a game of virtual golf and then capping it all off with dinner and an impromptu game of ‘name that tune.’ So if you were sitting in traffic that day and looked over at the car next to you and you see Kim Taehyung jammin’ to his music while driving do you just shit your pants right there and have to turn around and go home or .... we will never know will we?

That was definitely a lot of fun. I am certain the rest of the vlogs will be just as fun to watch. Yes, absolutely cannot wait for Jimin’s. 

When I watch Tae in various content like during this vlog and in other situations like concerts, during other performances and all the variety shows and interviews, I see his personality shine through and I just love him. 

So...here’s the part where I go off the rails...of all the crazy discourse in this fandom, the segment we call the <<cult>> just becomes more and more of an unacceptable aberration to me. It already was very much out of hand with the whole attack on that model dude and the jewelry maker, but looking at the big picture, how can anyone claim to be a fan of Kim Taehyung and treat him the way they do? You can say that it was just a few bad actors in that group but no...they enable each other, they allow their incredibly deceptive intentions to flourish and they are 100% not wanted in the fandom. What they do is beyond shipping. It is destructive manipulation. Anywho...got that out of my system.

That’s not what I was shook about. I was shook about watching this incredibly [did I already use that word? I did, oh well here it is again] incredibly (x4) captivating man just be himself for a little over 52 minutes.

I have to admit...and this will not sit well with some but here is a little TMI... after Jimin and Jungkook, I have an informal and somewhat uncongealed order of preference for the rest of the members: Hobi/Namjoon, Yoongi, Jin/Tae. BUT I LOVE THEM ALL DON’T COME FOR ME.

I absolutely adore all of them. It’s just that my attention is drawn by them in that somewhat fluid order. Tae is in last place a lot. Because of the cult. See what I mean? They are destructive.

[Apologies for being shook momentarily in teh middle of watching it... normally I am a very calm and collected little bean with a very discerning eye.]

[kiitsume]

a few thoughts on six the musical because nobody asked for them

(also excuse any historical inaccuracies, i've done only cursory reading thank you)

let's start light. the costumes are pretty but they completely take away any sense of historical context, unintentionally minimizing the degree of awareness the audience has of the culture surrounding the women at the time, which is actually pretty important to the message the writers are trying to construct.

the music is good. like, it's catchy and generally well written, and of course well performed. but the writers giveth and the writers taketh away. mostly they take away. all of the songs are reductive and collapse six people-- who they claim to attempt to honor the memory of-- down into platitudes and general notions of people, caricaturizing them into something that's barely recognizable.

the set up the musical to be a "competition between these six women to get the respect the deserve for the amount they suffered" and then they turn around at the end and shame the audience for doing that-- for picking favorites along the way and actually considering which ones they empathize most with.

the opening song, "ex-wives" uses modern lingo and whatnot, but it's not any more jarring that the costumes, so it's not until "don't lose your head" that the text speak really throws you off. it was honestly uncomfortable to watch in context of the musical, at least upon my viewing.

do i know they went chronologically? yes. will i ever forgive them for putting the most jarring joke of a song, "haus of holbein" right after arguably the most heartfelt song of the musical, jane seymour's "heart of stone"? absolutely fucking not.

haus of holbein has it's merits. i won't lie. it addresses the beauty standards of the time and the way that women were expected to destroy their bodies and give up their lives in order to appeal to men, which contributes to the larger narrative the writers were trying to build in saying that all these women would've led remarkable lives if they hadn't been forced to give themselves up to a life that made them miserable. but all of that is erased by the fact that it has air horns in it, i'm sorry, that can't be overlooked. literally die.

katherine (we're going with the musical's spelling okay) howard's song? a fucking bop. "all you wanna do" is iconic. but it has been brought to my attention by my girlfriend, who is much more knowledgeable on the six's actual history and writings, that pretty much the entire song is a complete disregard for who she was in life and her actual feelings, and that's especially irritating because they did it specifically for the purpose of constructing a much more simple narrative and, in the process, did the exact thing they claim to condemn: writing over her, and all the others, with what they think they know and bending them and their lives to fit their ideal message. how so? my girl k howard actually did have feelings for thomas. you know, the one person in the song she's like, "just mates, no chemistry/ i get him and he gets me/ and there's nothing more to it." they just throw that out to make thomas look like a nice guy and like people were just constantly taking advantage of her, which to some extent was true. but it also strips all the agency out of her life, and ignores the fact that "serious, stern and slow/ gets what he wants and he won't take no," francis dereham was the one who got jealous of her and thomas' relationship and snitched to the king and got her executed. there's literally no acknowledgement that he was anything other than just another fling or something. and, by omission, it implies that her music teacher, henry mannox, was the one and only one who groomed her (and molested her at 13). in reality, dereham's relationship with her started when she was 15 and he was 32. oh, and she was 17 when she married the 49 year old king. if the musical is supposed to form a cohesive narrative around how these girls were taken advantage of and thrown out by history as a joke, her story is literally ideal for that purpose. but instead we got naive girl uses sex to get ahead and then it backfires and she's killed for it.

not that thomas is innocent in all of this-- when the affair was brought to public light he blamed everything on howard and continued to deny ever sleeping with her, though he eventually admitted to intending to. there's some debate over whether their private meetings were actually an affair, but howard's writings on it make it seem as if she did have feelings for him, so. we may never know. but again, this is just to show the disservice the musical did to her.

i don't know as much about the other queens i'll admit, but here's just a few things that would be useful for the narrative the musical tries and fails to build: catherine parr was 15 when she was married to henry's brother arthur, who she couldn't speak to because they'd corresponded in latin but had different pronunciations-- this marriage was to give arthur greater legitimacy, because she was considered more strongly royal by blood; anne boleyn resisted henry's attempts to make her a mistress-- she was extremely smart, which was desirable in a mistress but not a wife!-- as her sister mary had been, and her daughter, unlike parr's is never acknowledged by the musical, the subjects called her "the king's whore" and blamed her for his tyranny, and-- oh, did i mention? historians debate whether there were any actual grounds for the charges brought against her that led to her execution, and most scholars regard it just something the king did so he could move on to seymour; jane seymour was married to henry the day after anne boleyn's execution, and she was never publically coronated in part because of a plague (woo!) but some also theorize that henry didn't want her to be coronated until she'd done her "duty as queen" and bore him a male heir; anne of cleves was described as extremely beautiful, so when the king met her and described her as "plain" he was incredibly let down, and immediately decided that he wanted to avoid the marriage altogether-- she was not considered ugly, as the musical makes it sound, just not good enough for the kings "selective" tastes (you know, the same henry who had a festering, ulcerated wound on his leg from a jousting accident); catherine parr is done the most justice, actually acknowledging the work she did in education and writing, the role she played in the establishment of the Third Succession Act which allowed her daughters access to the throne, and her two previous marriages (one of which was to someone twice her age) but it fails to acknowledge that her protestant sympathies got her targeted by arrest warrants before she reconciled with the king, and she was able to marry her lost love thomas seymour (different thomas, different seymour) in secret four months after the king's death, only to die a year and four months later.

also this: catherine of aragon was the only wife older than henry when they married, with her being 24 when and henry being 18; boleyn was 32 while henry was 42; seymour was 28, married to a 45 year old henry; anne of cleves was 25 and henry was 49; i repeat, howard was 17 when she was married to the 49 year old king; and parr was 31 and henry was 52.

and they were all flawed individuals, too, don't take my defenses of them to mean otherwise. in fact, as historical figures, i don't necessarily like all of them. but despite their flaws, they didn't deserve what happened to them, which is something the musical fails to portray in every way. it glosses over everything so quickly, which i understand is to be expected to a degree when you give each queen a six minute song to tell the story of their entire life, but the writing distorts them so badly they're hardly recognizable, and their stories are changed willy-nilly to fit the lazy empowerment theme rather than addressing them as they were.

the final song, "six." boy do i have thoughts. it's meant to seem empowering, and to an extent it is, because the characters they've given us get to talk about having a happy ending and making something of their lives that made them happy to have a legacy. but none of it's true, and it feels incredibly forced, especially because they take the concept of these women and pay no attention to them historically or what the figures they're based on would've actually wanted, and instead just says, "they all sing and dance and have a great time! question nothing!" and it just feels so hollow. it honestly made me feel even worse about the historical figures themselves and the suffering they endured, because it felt minimizing and shallow, like a platitude to make you stop thinking about how horribly they were treated. it was genuinely upsetting from that point of view, and despite how uplifting it's meant to be in the context of the show, it acknowledges that it's only a dream by giving a time limit to their happiness-- five minutes. and after that point you're supposed to go on continuing to be happy, having connected with these people and been empowered by their stories, when you are given very little of their actual stories and are shamed for analyzing things through the lens they gave you at the opening of the show. not to mention how horribly they trample over their message of how restrictive and repressive their lives were by nature of their station and says that, "well, if they could've just made different choices they would've been happy!" ignoring how the culture gave them no other choice and there's a pretty good chance that, even if they had made the choices they wanted to, they would've still been held back by virtue of their gender and station. the story behind six is not empowering, and it feels horrible to have it twisted around that was to make it seem empowering. i understand not wanting to beat down your audience and make them miserable, but rather than reducing these women down to such simplified caricatures and then having them all bond and have a girl power moment, it would've been much more impactful to have their actual concerns be what they bonded over-- being forgotten, talked over, held back, so on-- and talking about the people they actually were. having them write their own stories is fun and all, but having them actually tell their stories and feel heard, even if it's in a time they'll never see, is a much less reductive sentiment.

tl;dr: so basically i thought the musical was badly written for the message they were trying to send, and no amount of good music or talented performance can save a boring or badly written musical, and the six queens still deserve better.