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aetherspoon · 16 days

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Hi total stranger here sorry to jump into your inbox but I saw you mentioned a drive that allowed you to bypass the truly awful 4K uhd settings that I've literally only just heard about?

Oooo, my first ask!

So, I'll post the short version here and the long version under a cut.

The short version is simple - I have a USB UHD (4k) BluRay drive from LG. At the time I bought it, it had firmware that could be upgraded to some unofficial firmware that can avoid that garbage. That drive isn't recommended anymore, which is why I'm not bothering to give you the model number, but if you look at this site:

It will give you the list of drives that ARE recommended for this type of thing. You can even buy some pre-flashed drives from people if you don't want to mess with that.

My drive has worked fine for me, but admittedly I've only used a few UHD discs on it (and a whole lot of normal blu-rays and DVDs).

Now, the longer version is under the cut, including one of my patented totally normal (blatant sarcasm tag here) analogies that still somehow work.

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I'm going to use an analogy here, because that's how I explain tech.

Let's pretend your Blu-Ray (regardless of whether it is UHD/4k or not - see my notes at the end for a fun fact) is a VIP performing at your exclusive club called Blu-Ray Drive. You'd think that, because you own the club, you can watch the VIP perform, right?

Wrong.

You see, the club has a bouncer by the name of AACS. Every VIP insists on one of their bouncers being at the club, deciding who to let in and what they get to do. The bouncer doesn't actually work for you, they work for the VIP, and no VIP will come to your club if you don't have one of their bouncers.

Also, just for more paranoia, every VIP will have its own list of who and what to allow, along with where they're allowed to stand. Each time you have a new VIP come to your club, they give their own list; if the bouncer sees the list is newer, they throw away all of the old lists and only keep the newest one. On top of that, AACS is a nationalist asshole that decided to only allow people from their own country in, because the VIPs want to charge people differently based on their nationality.

The VIPs even require some fancier clubs to have a courier continually delivering them new lists (this is where that UHD/4k Internet connection thing comes from).

All of the stuff you want is inside of that club, but the bouncer won't let you in because you're not on the list (and might not even from the right country). And you can't just sack the bouncer because then no VIP will play at your club.

You heard of another problem at a similar club (Club DVD), where their more local VIPs required them to hire a bouncer named CSS. However, CSS wasn't paid very well, was near sighted, and never bothered to update the list; all of your friends just called themselves "Maria Wang" and CSS let them in. Your VIPs know about that though, so they insist on the updating list thing and giving their bouncers eye exams. So what do you do?

Simple. You call a buddy and they kool-aid man through the back wall of your club shouting OH YEAH!, of course.

This is a completely logical analogy, I know. I should really commission an artist to draw this.

This buddy is called LibreDrive. Your VIPs still have their bouncer - anyone who doesn't know about the secret entrance still goes through the bouncer. The people who do know - including you and your friends - just go through the secret entrance instead. The VIP company is none the wiser.

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Now that my completely logical analogy is over, what does this actually mean tech-wise?

The way DVDs work is by using an encryption technology called CSS. However, in late 1999, someone figured out how to break the encryption, mostly because they did a really lazy job in making it to begin with. This is DeCSS. There were huge lawsuits, poetry made using source code, a whole lot of weird things. Today, we don't even need DeCSS; the encryption on DVDs are so bad that a modern computer can brute force decrypt it in seconds.

Fundamentally, both DVDs and blu-rays work the same way. There is a portion of the disc (DVD or blu-rays) that no drive is allowed to directly read. This contains the encryption information for the rest of the data on the disc. That encryption information is used by the player as to what is and isn't allowed to read the disc and what parts they ARE allowed to read. This is also where region locking comes in, where it checks what region your drive is set to and allows/denies discs to play based on that region; this is called CSS. If you are old enough to remember the bad old days of WinDVD and PowerDVD, those applications had encryption keys allowed by the DVD drive to play back the video content on the drive.

Anyone remember those cheap knock-off "region free" DVD players that used to be really common in the 2000s? They just ignored CSS entirely; the drives themselves can still read all of the data on the disc, it was just CSS telling the drive what it could or couldn't read.

Anyway, the movie studios, seeing their "beautiful creation" get ripped apart like that, wanted to make sure that it didn't happen the same way with their next technology.

Where blu-ray differs from DVDs is how it isn't using CSS at all, but something called AACS instead. It makes this list into a continually updating list; every time your drive (whether it is in a computer or a standalone player!) sees a new disc, it checks that hidden encryption information for a list of what is and isn't allowed to access the drive. If the list on the disc is of a newer version than what the drive currently has in its firmware, the disc will actually flash the firmware of your blu-ray drive with the new allow/deny list. Then it checks again - does the firmware match what the disc has? If so, it continues. If not, it refuses to play no matter what. From there, the rest of the process is basically the same, checking any player for a list of keys allowed to play it. If it sees a key not allowed (say, your ripping software), it says no and stops everything from reading it.

Unlike DVDs with CSS, these keys are actually pretty darn secure... and even if they weren't, studios would just release an updated allow/deny list and suddenly your computer can't rip discs anymore because the latest version of Frozen came out.

UHD (4k) blu-ray players take this one step further and just continually update that allow/deny list across the Internet rather than waiting for new discs to update that allow/deny list. This is why a standalone UHD blu-ray player needs WiFi, by the way. It isn't used for anything else.

So... how to avoid it? You could use a leaked key and basically hope that it isn't updated. This is how most blu-ray ripping software works, which is also why they need continual updating while movie studios play cat and mouse. And with UHD content, that's a really tiny window of time that you can do unauthorized things with the drive.

Remember our surprise tool - the drive itself still has to be able to read everything, it is just AACS stopping us. If we can somehow just get a drive to not care about AACS, we'd have access to everything we care about.

LibreDrive is a custom firmware that basically lets all of the above still happen, but any program aware of LibreDrive can just use it to access the full disc. It acts as an intermediary between the physical drive itself and software on your computer, similar to AACS itself. Like the analogy said, you're kool-aid manning a security hole into the drive's encryption. AACS is still happy because it can still update its firmware allow/deny list, you just bypass AACS entirely. Every byte of data on the blu-ray is accessible to whatever programs know about this security hole, which includes programs like MakeMKV and anything using the open source (and illegalish - see below) LibDriveIo library. Fun fact, you can just copy that library in to VLC and it'll use it.

Unfortunately, you can't just flash LibreDrive onto any drive. Basically, someone needs to be able to read the existing firmware on a drive in order to know what to modify to open up that security hole. This means you need specific drives on specific versions of firmware to flash LibreDrive.

The industry, however, caught on to this. They started requiring drive manufacturers to encrypt their firmware, so some newer revisions of drives that used to work now don't - this is the case with my drive.

And that's... the rest of the story.

Now, my notes:

You know how I said UHD/4k and regular blu-rays work the same? Yeah, it isn't just that they work the same - sometimes they're actually the exact same drive. Some regular blu-ray drives can actually read UHD discs, they're just not allowed to by AACS because "fuck you that's why". LibreDrive can work around that, too.

Illegalish? Well, circumventing copy protection isn't allowed under the US's Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), outside of specific scenarios. And the US's copyright laws tend to get copied over to a lot of other countries as a result of the trade deals they make with each other, hence "illegalish". You make your own moral call, my morality says that personal use to rip your own media should have always been legal and I should be able to play a Brazilian version of the Phantom Menace if I want to.

Some additional source reading material: https://forum.makemkv.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=18856 for "What is LibreDrive", which explains the same thing I did but without my fun analogy and using more technical terms. It also includes the full list of drive firmware that works with LibreDrive.

#I guess I should have an ask tag?#ask aetherspoon #DRM #DRM Bullshit #technology #blu ray

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pb-dot · 1 year

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Film Friday: Everything Everywhere All At Once

In order to sate my frequently insatiable appetite for talking about movies, I am going to start a bit of a column on this here webbed site. Every Friday I'll be sharing my perspectives, interpretation or just wild gushing about or rancorous condemnation of a movie. First in line is none other than Everything Everywhere All At Once. Content warning: Heavy topics such as family troubles, sexuality, mental health problems, and generational trauma. I'm getting into the weeds with this one. There'll also be spoilers, and frankly, if you haven't seen this one yet, I can hardly recommend it enough. Don't read the rest of this, just go see it, you will be confused and delighted and probably crying just a little bit.

Everything Everywhere All At Once has received all but unilateral praise, and I think it rightly deserves it. Even so, there are some aspects of how this thing is so impossibly awesome and some of the more specific facets of the ways it is so impossibly awesome that get overlooked.

Yes, there is no denying it is a powder keg of impossibly cool dimension-hopping kung fu, as raucously comedic as it is genuinely heartrending. It should stand on its own how powerfully the movie speaks on generational trauma, conflict, and healing from the same. The acting is somewhere north of incredible, with Michelle Yeoh, Stephanie Hsu, and Ke Hyu Quan delivering several lifetimes worth of life-best performances. You know the cast is stacked when James Hong is in a movie and he doesn't get to be the best thing about the movie all on his lonesome just by showing up, for once.

All of this is very true, but as far as I'm concerned it's hardly scratching the surface of EEAAO, and why it might be the best movie of the decade. First off, I want to talk a bit about the queer themes of the picture.

One thing I keep coming back to in Everything is how I find it nearly impossible to not read Evelyn Wang as bisexual. Well, I say bisexual which is probably a bad habit on my end, as mspec probably is a better umbrella term to use when the exact nature of her attraction isn't explored in much detail.

Now, why do I read her like this? Evelyn is, obviously, married to her husband Waymond, but there are still reasons one might suspect she is not exclusively attracted to men. We see Evelyn in a sapphic relationship, albeit it is in what might be the single most unlikely parallel universe imaginable where humans have evolved to possess functionally useless hotdog-fingered hands. Still, I would argue that the seeming impossibility of the outcome might be a narrative device all on its own.

Being in a queer relationship seems almost impossible to Evelyn, to the degree that professing genuine love to IRS Maven and minor antagonist Deidre is sufficiently out of character to launch her into her first multiversal ability jump. Almost impossible, however, does not mean impossible, and the fact that there's even a question and that she can eventually do it does imply something about Evelyn's sexuality I would say.

Also, on a less textual plane, doesn't part of this sound very familiar? If you, like me, came into your queer identity as an adult, doesn't the "living a genuine queer life feeling like a distant impossible dream" strike a deep resonating chord? Granted I've never considered having disgusting sausage fingers a prerequisite, but then again, Evelyn has a few years on me for such a neurosis to develop.

Now that I think about it, the visceral unpleasantness of the literal sausage fingers could be read as a form of body anxiety as it pertains to sexuality, at least when the condiments get involved.

Another thing that supports this reading is the parallels between Evelyn and her daughter Joy. This isn't to say that one has to be Mspec to have a sapphic daughter, of course. Considering how alike Evelyn and Joy are, though, and how acutely their struggles are mirrored in other fields, mental health struggles, desire for parental approval, etc., it's not an outrageous leap to assume Evelyn could also bat for the other team, as it were, lending extra weight to the "I prayed she wouldn't turn out like me" line she delivers to her disapproving father.

It's also interesting from this point that Evelyn acknowledging Joy's sexuality to her father's face functions as a sort of False Dawn in the plot. It is no doubt a part of mending the relationship but at the moment it's hard to not agree with Joy's assessment that this is more "[Evelyn] figuring her shit out" than the mending that her relationship with her daughter needs. To get all the way there, Evelyn, and we along with her, have to take a deep dive into the philosophy and the all-annihilating bagel.

There's also some really cool philosophy going on in Everything Everywhere. In the formal sense of things, the philosophy navigates the borderlands between Nihilism and Existentialism. Jobu Tupaki represents utter despairing nihilism, wishing for non-existence to rid herself of the pain of being and the crushing weight of knowledge of her million alternate lives and how nary a one of them offers as much as a morsel of relief.

Nihilism is one of those things that popular culture often imbues with entirely too much power owing to the understanding that hopelessness is somehow more intellectual than less despondent philosophies. Everything Everywhere treats Joy's hopelessness not as an inherently valid position, but as a reaction to the cascading failure of her family to prove proper care.

Look no further than how Jobu wants her mother, Evelyn Prime, to accompany her into the nothingness of the Everything Bagel. If, truly, nothing mattered, it wouldn't make any difference to Jobu whether she walked into the nothingness of the bagel singularity alone or hand in hand with Evelyn or with every single soul in the IRS. And yet, she pursues the version of her mother that can see what she sees in the vain hope that this Evelyn will feel as she feels and reach the same conclusions she has. It's very understandable, of course, but it severely undermines the point that there is nothing worth caring for in the universe.

It shouldn't really surprise the astute reader that the villain of a kung-fu action film isn't correct in the philosophical sense. The deftness with which Everything Everywhere handles the reveal of it all is, however, quite heartening. Jobu Tupaki isn't wrong because she's evil or evil because she's wrong; She's acting out because she's hurting and, ultimately in need of the help of her parents. Evelyn struggles similarly, and it's a good thing that she is married to the single most transcendentally kind man in all of existence.

Waymond Wang is in many ways the lynchpin of the entire movie, the pivot point that allows Evelyn to find a way out of hopelessness and regret. The way he accomplishes this is, again in the context of this being a kung-fu movie, highly unusual. Waymond is unflinchingly kind, in a way that at least initially makes him seem like a colossal wimp, a stereotypical henpecked husband. While it is true that Waymond is a bit of a wet blanket, there is also quiet strength to his approach. As In The Mood For Love-Waymond so memorably put it, his front of unflinching kindness is how he fights.

What makes the whole final sequence so rousingly powerful is how Evelyn internalizes and synthesizes the perspectives of her little family. Her instinct to protect her daughter in ways her father couldn't protect her and Waymond's conflict-solving kindness allows her to overcome the final barriers between her and Jobu. This comes in the form of some kickass untraditional kung fu, yes, but also from the realization that there is no one beyond hope, redemption, or beyond love. Even the bitter battleaxe IRS agent, even the parallel universe where everyone has hotdogs for fingers, even the aging widower with no sense of personal space, hell, even Chad the raccoon avatar.

It is a powerful scene of catharsis to see Evelyn compassion-fight entire swathes of opponents, but it doesn't become the transcendent piece of media that it is before the confrontation with Jobu in the Prime branch, and her father and Joy in the Prime Beta-branch. Here, the final piece of the puzzle awaits in the single most difficult thing a parent can do. Evelyn defeats Jobu and stands up to her father, yes, but to truly mend the rift between her and Joy, she must see and understand Joy's pain through true empathy, and if there is to be a happy ending for her and Joy, Evelyn must do the unthinkable.

Evelyn has to let Jobu go and trust that Joy comes back to her. If Joy chooses continued existence, it's of her own free will. Evelyn will go every step of the way alongside Joy if Joy will allow her, but it is ultimately up to her daughter. It's a profound act of love and empathy, and yet it feels almost impossible. It is an act of ultimate vulnerability, and, in some ways, the grandest act in a movie of grand acts, and even thinking back on it now brings tears to my eyes.

#peebs thinks #film friday #eeaao #everything everywhere all at once #unmitigated gushing #cw violence #cw family issues #cw flashing #cw homophobia #philosophy #existentialism #nihilism

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shpadoinkle-day · 1 year

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Annoying Trey Parker

If you don't know who Trey Parker is, might I suggest that that huge, dark object over your head is a rock you've been under for three years and you should come out from under it? I've been a fan of Trey Parker and Matt Stone since seeing Alferd Packer: The Musical about four years ago. I missed out on South Park at first, but when I finally did start watching it, I had no idea it was also by Trey and Matt. It did make a lot of sense when someone finally told me...anywho, how did I get ahold of Trey Parker to ask him these questions? Well, back when I first started the old website, I had a bunch of South Park stuff up, and one of the things was a series of questions I'd ask Matt and Trey...but not really. They were mostly stupid things that were just jokes. Well, somehow, Trey found the site and answered all the questions. This is why he got out of my standard Bad Taste and Simpsons questions. Yes, I feel stupid, but since I am so good at looking like an ass, anyway, what's a little help from one of the world's best satirists?

Me: In the song ''Blame Canada,'' Terrance and Phillip are referred to as cartoons, yet they interact with the people of South Park. Does this mean that the people are all cartoons and aware of that fact, or was ''cartoon'' just a better word in the song than ''movie?''

Trey: Shiela said they are actors, but Cartman said they were animated, but the movie IS a cartoon, dude.

M: In the South Park movie, was Big Gay Al cast in an anti-Canadian role as a testimony to the fact that ANYONE can succumb to biases, or was it just a cheap way to bring back a popular character?

T: It's just funny that they like him because it's a gay guy at a USO Show, gay and army usually don't mix.

M: Since it hurts to do Cartman's voice, do you find yourself sometimes conciously reducing his part or writing him out all together?

T: No, Cartman is the one who says the politically incorrect stuff that nobody else has the balls to say.

M: Does it bother you that people are always curious if you're gay even though it has absolutely NO baring whatsoever on your work and is a completely meaningless, stupid thing to wonder?

T: They do?

M: So...are you gay?

T: No, you seem like a big fan, ever heard of Lianne or Toddy?

(Lianne is the horse in Alferd Packer, but I don't know who Toddy is...)

M: How come the South Park home videos are still censored?

T: The people at Rhino are dicks sometimes.

M: Was the re-use of the stage name ''Juan Schwartz'' on the Mr. Hankey CD a signal to long time fans that there will be a Cannibal 2, or was it just a way to try and hide the fact that you two do all the voices?

T: We have long time fans?

M: Why the fuck was Orgazmo NC-17? Was it the dog humping scene? Was that scene fun to shoot? If you had to shoot that scene again, would you pick a different breed?

T: There is an unrated version out there somewhere too.

M: Was South Park: Bigger, Longer, and Uncut always going to be an attack on the biased, idiotic MPAA, or did that just evovle because they really suck?

T: Both, just another group we hadn't offended enough yet

M: Tell me, if a group is an ''advisory'' board for parents, giving out ''suggestions,'' how is it that NO ONE under 17 was allowed into South Park without an adult, when surely a suggestion implies that parents should not allow their children to see it, not that the theatres should become some sort of police state just to keep underagers from YOUR film?

T: Ask the wangs who sell the tickets.

M: Whenever Hitler appears, he is always speaking gibberish. Is this a statement that people will follow along with anything if it's said well, or merely an indication of your lack of German skills?

T: That is all Matt's fault!!

M: How annoying is it when fans spot ''goofs'' that are actually jokes and make a big deal about how you fucked up? Like if someone said that Mr. Garrison's history lessons are very inaccurate or something.

T: Some people are complete retards.

M: DVDA should release an EP or something. You've already got at least 3 songs down.

T: In our spare time, right?

M: I hope you didn't try to answer that last one, as it wasn't a question.

T: I hate you now.

M: Nor was that.

T: I want to hit you.

M: If you two could be any type of fish, would you prefer Scooby Doo or erasable pens?

T: I want to bitchslap you and shoot frozen paintballs at you.

#trey parker #matt stone #interview #from the webarchive #GAY TREY TRUTHERS FALLEN TO THEIR KNEES myself included

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strawberrylollipop26-blog-blog · 1 year

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Update on what I'm watching

I finished Sunshine By My Side. Ah, what to say. While the series isn't that bad, definitely not my type of style. I don't really watch dramas to begin with and this one aimed to be more realistic which means a bit boring. Some aspects obviously weren't. Spoiler Warning. For example, both of them having problems at work at the exact same time. A bit cheesy. Sheng Yang skyrocketing (classic downhill uphill scenario). The end felt rushed to me. There's something for almost everyone so not every character spoke to me. I think that's normal for iffy shows I'm not too sure of. It's not worth a rewatch to me even though there are some cute moments.

Jian Bing is actually a character I like. Some sites had people who disliked her, but I thought she was written well. My only problem with her was her insistence to refer to Sheng Yang as 'kid' or the translation version of it. He's 26. At 26, I had been independent since 22. Sure, he's lacking some qualities people learn with age, but I'm still the same exact person I was then. In her defense, they do make SY do some questionable things.

Sheng Yang, I like him too. He does go from being a tad meek to punch first. He was a little pushy with her in the beginning. Sir, she just divorced. Back up ten feet. Everything else I liked about him though. I think his storyline would've been a little better if they had him and her try to work out on his limited salary. Nothing wrong with matching her financially, but I would've liked to see them try and end on him starting his own business.

A few questionable things happened.

Why on earth did they introduce possible competition for SY? Cheesy.

The sister storyline? The dad storyline? These people just popped up.

They weren't bad, but I wasn't involved either.

The PDA at the end. Why? This is probably just the introvert in me screaming. LOL

....

I'm still watching SDOC 3. I'm slow. After giving SBMS a try. I now feel ready to attempt Gank Your Heart or attempt Being a Hero again (or is it Be a Hero). SDOC3 has me stressed. I swear if I see him heart broken like in the first episode I'm done. I almost cried.

Why are these episodes 2 and a half hours long?

Miscellaneous.

I finally have a clue who Jackson Wang is. Haha. I see his photo and little video clips of him alot, but never knew of him.

#xiao zhan #sbms #sunshine by my side #sheng yang #sdoc3 #wang yibo

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anxious-winter-walker · 2 years

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NOOO DEAR GODS WHY HATH THOU FORSAKE YOURS TRULY

I'm usually asleep the times Ao3 goes down😭😭

#ao3 #archive of our own #its finals week #i neeed my emotional support fics #and i need them now #what does this site wang me to do??#sleep!!

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meatsauce · 2 years

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Also one of my favorite resources for Matt and Trey things is this website! The website is in German, don’t quote me on that, but google does a pretty good job translating it. There are transcripts from interviews and pictures with dates. :) very fun stuff

It holds my favorite Matt interview too! It’s an email rapid fire thing he did back in November of 2005. He starts the thing in Spanish, which is funny to me. You really see a lot of his quirks in how he types. It might seem like the typos are there because of the translation, but I read the transcript on the web archive site and they were there too. I smile so hard when I read it. C: I know I’m probably late to the game, but these are some of my highlights!

link: Delita184 asks: Do you and Trey still have time to play music for fun, or do most of your musical efforts end up going towards the show?

MattStone: We don't really jam anymore. If "jam" was ever what you would call it. Now we focus on the ol day job. Making tv

link: I will say that matt just played maybe 4 made up songs for me with wu tang as backup on his guitar

nall: unknown asks, Have you ever used your fame for evil?

MattStone: Not many times, if you ask me. If you ask the Hollywood cheezmos that we had kicked off their table so that Trey and I could sit down with our friends, they might answer differently. But then I've gotten kick off a table by bruce willis before. And Twiggy from Marilyn Manson! So yes. Using fame for evil is a daily temptation....

nall: Airman44 My friend (a dude) is dying to know... how big is you wang?

MattStone: […] As far as my wang, I'm in the lower percentile of magnum wearers.

<@jolon> From unknown: Are You Bigger, Longer, and Uncut?

[08:12:52] <@mattstone> I'm bigger then Jeremy Piven and longer then Gary Coleman but unfortunately, I'm a jew.

#matt stone #south park

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betweentheracks · 4 years

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Hello and yay for this blog!!! I have a question :D. If a certain Chinese star were to wear jeans that say "my cock is gluten free" and "pull me down and fuck me," do you think his stylist would have chosen this knowingly, or do you think it's possible they just were like "hmm english words looks good" and didn't bother to look up the meaning? If they did know the meaning, would they have likely informed the star? Very desperate for the thought process behind this Choice hehehe. Thank you!

Ah, I was wondering hoping if I would get asked about those infamous jeans and here you are!

First and foremost; the following is all speculation from my experiences in the business and is wholly subjective.

It isn’t impossible that they weren’t aware of what was written on the jeans, but it also isn’t all that likely either. When you pull up these jeans on the Dsquared2 site there’s a listing of what is doodled and written on the jeans and it’s not something that would be overlooked by neither stylist nor client.

That said, Yibo does know some English and while he may not have known these words exactly, there’s more than enough ways of discerning their meaning. I would also bet half a year of my salary that his stylist would have known what was written here, or any number of personnel that works with them for that matter. I would also take into consideration that even if the jeans had slipped by all these people that may or may not have had the ability to see what was all over them, some of Yibo’s fellow idols should have (looking at you specifically, Seungyoun).

Setting this aside for a moment, I’ll go into who I think is responsible for the jeans being worn to begin with - Wang Yibo himself is the likely culprit.

Why do I think this? There’s many reasons but most are inconsequential while two points frame the scene as I see it.

This is markedly not a choice a stylist would make. Stylists, at the end of it all, are employees and therefore it shouldn’t be too surprising to know we have rules in place we must abide no matter if we are working outside the purview of the company we are housed under. Even when we work exclusively with a client, we are still taking the name of our company as well as our own with us and are operating as an extension of the brand the company promotes and promises. I don’t know of any company here (and I live in rather free faring place which welcomes eccentricities, mind) that would allow these jeans to be submitted as part of a pitch to either buy or borrow unless they were very specifically in line with a client’s public image and style. Technically these jeans would classify as offensive and profane which means they would invite trouble and cause a stir. While stylists are not associated much with the PR side of things we are still essentially a team playing for the same client - this selection, if gone badly, would be like asking for lightning to strike twice in one place at the same time. If a scandal amounted from them PR would have to handle it and that means the stylist would come under fire for making such a bold and risky choice, most especially with a younger client that thus far didn’t have the sort of image one would think to associate with jeans such as these.

The second reason is that, from what I can tell, this is in line with Yibo’s personality. He’s very serious about style and engages with it as he does most things; by overtaking it completely and rebranding it to suit him to the point that it makes one wonder if the style wasn’t designed with him in mind. He makes full use of what fashion is all about at it’s core; expression. These jeans in particular would have suited the Yibo of the time he wore them (2018, if I remember right?) as he was trying to break away from the image he held as a pretty boy with demure and soft looks which held the shock value of being in such contrast with his dancing and rapping. He’s mentioned before that he doesn’t really like being “cute/sy” and having to do things in the way of that since it’s not true to who he feels he is. Which, honestly, a lot of idols and stars go through this experience where they no longer wish to be constrained by the persona they play for the public and one of the most impactful means of going about it is to address the styling since it is the focal point of public image.

The Dsquared2 jeans don’t only say “my cock is gluten free,” there’s actually quite a lot to them and I think it would help if more were aware of it so here’s the description of them on the website:

D Squared Limited Edition Jeans. Sexy Twist Printed Low Rise. Fun, Evil Boy, Love Sucks, Pull Me Down, Open Me, Unzip, Buttons, Wine Is My Water, Tic Tac Toe, Dean & Dan, Sex, Gluten Free Cock, Hot Patches

The jeans actually say “pull me down and fuck me” right there on the ass, but naturally they can’t list the expletives in the marketing. Not strictly important to this post, but still worth mentioning given the hushed treatment of what the placement of such words could easily imply and the effect that could have had.

Anyway, the bit that is very telling in my opinion is that “evil boy” tag. I’m not terribly certain due to having never been fortunate enough to work with these jeans myself and the internet only has so many pictures from so many angles, but “evil boy” is either written somewhere (which I think is the case since there’s devil horns present as well) or they’re being promoted as such for aesthetic value. Regardless, I am fairly certain this would be the feature which caught Yibo’s eye. It’s on brand for someone seeking to shatter the conceptual ideal of being naive, innocent, youthful, or soft.

The jeans as a whole fit with Yibo’s sense of humor, as I’ve seen it at least. He lost his mind and fell into full laughter and hysterics over a dick joke, not even minding that he was being filmed or anything. He was still laughing about it even after the other hosts had moved beyond it, making them circle back around to it and in turn making it all the more hilarious for him to enjoy. You can see it clearly in the bts footage from the CQL set that he enjoys being mischievous and stirring things up and having a good time.

This is who he is, I believe, and it makes a lot of sense for him to have made this stylistic choice and then either convince his stylist to let him run with it or change out at the last second. Both of these are possible, though one of them is less probable than the other given how tricky it actually would be to sneak a wardrobe alteration past the many people that make up the staffing roster for any events, and then to be able to change in the limited time frame available between exiting the dressing room to being in the public sphere would be one in a thousand. Much simpler to goad your stylist into being lenient enough to give you free reign over your own styling - we can only hold out and say no when the grounds for it are met, which this wouldn’t have done in all likelihood - and most of the time we build up a good enough relationship and rapport with clients that we end up doting on them a bit and heed their requests when we can.

That’s all from me on this token moment in Yibo’s very stacked fashion history. Thanks for asking!

Furthermore, there’s the third possibility that this wasn’t a styling choice whatsoever. Or at least not one that involved the stylist in any real regard. It is very plausible that this was just Yibo in his own clothes, having dressed down after the main events wound down. I’ve never actually watched to see what that night looked like overall, but from the videos I have seen it looked to me like the actual do had passed and they were all just goofing around and having their own dance competitions and such when he was wearing them. I can’t say for sure that he did or did not have them on for the whole thing or if they were his own self packed casual wear. In which case it would fall back to his studio to tend to since stylists generally don’t hold authority over personal clothing choices and only ever have a hand in it when it is expressly stated in contracts or temporary clauses, and it just isn’t too common anymore.

Worth a quick mention for means of distinction, here in the US this choice wouldn't have raised many eyebrows no matter if it was chosen by an artist or a stylist. The only reason I feel it necessary to say this is simply because this is not so in China and that alone lends context to the controversy of these jeans. In the scope of conservatism these jeans are outrageous and I think that a stylist would steer clear of utilizing them at all if they value their job. This is why I don't consider it likely at all that Yibo and his stylist collaborated to make use of these jeans as a way to shake away the remnants of his pretty boy aesthetic.

#wang yibo #dsquared2 #racks asks

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accio-victuuri · 4 years

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Devil Timeline : GG and Web before the official meeting.

Disclaimer that this is All CPN and nothing is really proven. As with all these things, feel free to disagree. Don’t crack your head open thinking, we’re all just clowning here. some info on here are taken from different sources and others I added in.

What is this timeline/theory all about?

This CPN is all about them liking each other as early as 2015-2016. This is different from the love at first sight theory from 2017 & with them keeping in touch till they meet again in 2018. Part of this speculation is that they are ex-boyfriends. Also that Web was punished (what for and if this is even true, we don’t know.) by his company in 2016 before hosting Day Day Up. I don’t buy the ex-lovers part/punishment. My take on this Devil Timeline is that they were lowkey fanboying each other or have a crush on e/o. Where they in contact or have they met? Yes. possibly.

Plus, It’s not too outrageous to believe that they know of each other. GG is a koreaboo and he most probably heard of UNIQ. Web on the other hand, most likely heard of XNINE.

So where are they between 2015-2016?

GG joined the reality program x-fire in 2015 and went on to debut with xnine on 2016 as the main vocalist. Notable acting job was superstar academy. Web on the other hand, was busy with UNIQ. Promoting in Korea, China, Thailand, Brazil and Japan. Notable in 2015 was the release of EOEO. In 2016, he joined the cast of Chinese Odyssey part 3 and was also announced as an assistant host for Day Day Up.

What are some key points to this Timeline?

1. Love Mole : It all started with this photo. Web holding a picture he drew of someone smiling and with a Mole. A mole on the same place as GG’s.

Another explanation for this is, he was actually drawing himself. there is a fake rumor that says Web is fixated with GG’s mole because he had one on the same site when he was a kid ; then disappeared over time. It goes on to say that Web jokes that GG stole his mole. (this joking tho was done during CQL shooting).

Recently, you can see in his photos that it’s there again. It’s literally the LOVE MOLE! but yeah, going back -- the delulu interpretation here is he was drawing GG.

2. GG’s dream lover : 2016, On GG’s vlog for Qixi he talks about a “dream lover” and drew it on paper. He goes on to say that he left the face blank as appearance doesn’t matter- It’s about the feeling.

Now onto the drawing of GG, bxg compares the features of the figure to Web.

3. Parallels : Similar posts from 2015-2016. There is not too much out there and we can’t really verify cause of GG’s weibo post restrictions. I can’t find ones aside from the example below cause most of the same posts that we have screenshots of are from 2017 onwards.

On 6/2015, Web posted a picture of himself visiting a spongebob exhibit. On 2/2016, GG shared a picture from his visit of the same place with his friends. It’s too far apart if you ask me and so many people love spongebob, so this could really be a coincidence and not them cueing each other.

4. How long have they really known each other? : The Usually reserved Web was so open with GG during that 2017 TTXS episode. Remember that Web only started being an assistant host on 2016 and is usually very shy. But he interacted with GG in the simplest way by imitating his gesture. Tho the TTXS bros were the first ones who did it, he went ahead and did the pose too. His smile was also teasing.

Compare this with their CQL interviews and GG recalling what he said to his bandmate who was scared that it’s Web who he’s gonna battle with.

I don’t think he said that because he doesn’t know who Web is. Again, it’s too familiar. Like, don’t worry it’s just Web, I know him, he’s good, he won’t kill you. In this interview he proceeds to say that he has faith in his bandmate but after watching Web dance, he knew they could not win.

Also add Web’s reaction in this interview, trying to wave GG off when he kept on saying he knew of Web for a long time already.

GG, you just met in 2017, why are you saying you’ve known him for a very long time? “know of” is such a broad term. It can be you know them personally or because Web has been a celebrity longer , that’s why he knew of him. we are betting it’s the latter.

So if that’s what we’re thinking, then why did he say that he knew they couldn’t win AFTER seeing Web dance. If you’ve been a fan and KNOW who wang yibo is- the first thing you will find is that he is an EXCELLENT DANCER. It doesn’t match up. Unless, It’s really GG who first followed Web’s career?

I can go on and on about things these two have lied about from eggplants to carrots and that waterfall scene. They have a say on what narrative they want to put out in this interviews, whether they honestly forgot things or are actively refusing to give information. It’s up to them what they wanna say.

5. Love clues from 2015-2016 :

Web’s ideal type : Suzy from Miss A (which was i guess everyone’s ideal girl in the KPOP world during that time) and Taeyeon from SNSD. I know there are parallels of how Suzy and GG look alike and how Taeyeon is kinda like GG. They are both vocalists and are older than Web.

GG’s ideal type : He said he wants someone who is gentle but can still stand on their own. Also someone with personality. Plus, he doesn’t care if his other half can’t cook because he will do it. When asked what he will do if him and his friend like the same person, he says if he really likes the person then he will fight for it.

6. The first table read : This is a new entry based on the BTS released last night. We only had snippets of this when they were joking around but this new video shows more. GG just naturally turns to Web and like he’s done it before. There is still some shyness when they were talking about pants but it doesn’t look like two people who have only interacted today. Especially Web’s demeanor, there is a time or two that he hesitates when joking, but that could be because he is testing the waters.

There was Absolutely no barriers (from GG) in tapping Web’s back a couple of times. If I’m a stranger just watching this, I’ll tell you these two have known each other for quite some time. Not just from that 2017 meeting and beyond.

7. A 2016 drawing - Over the years, we have learned that GG, like many artists put clues in their drawings. with things up to interpretation, as most of the time, he does not explain things outright. One BXG pointed out this drawing he made of a heart + bunny + cat. the Bunny is obviously him, so, love with a cat? Plus the look of the cat, like it’s looking at an innocent bunny. I know power dynamics between the two is a complicated topic, BUT----

8. WILDCARD: I know this is a popular fake rumor out there but we don’t really have evidence. No picture and I don’t have a screenshot of a fan account. It says GG went to a Uniq fanmeet on 6/22 in Guangzhou cause he wants to research about idols. This is before he went on xfire. The date 6/22 matches with the 622 coincidence. Consider this as fanfic but this lives in my mind.

That’s it. feel free to add thoughts or some other info you have about this timeline cause I’m sure that I don’t have it all. It feels so good to finally put this out because it’s been sitting on my draft for some time T.T. I am sure there are other explanations for this timeline.This is all CPN anyway. Please don’t take seriously.

This posted was last edited on 11/28/2020 12:53 PM

#yizhan #bjyx #devil timeline

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bao3bei4 · 4 years

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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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minmotl · 4 years

Text

Chapter 66: Tang Fan Realizes He Cannot Lose Sui Zhou

Context: Sui Zhou, Tang Fan and their men head into one of the tombs together after finding remnants of the missing villagers right outside the entrance of a tomb. One of the men’s lower body has already been eaten up, and they are sure that there is a sort of creature and monster in the tomb, and hence decide to visit and clear this case once and for all.

They are accompanied by the old village chief’s oldest son, and once they are there and get into trouble, Tang Fan and Sui Zhou finally find out who this son actually is - Li Man, Tang Fan’s previous landlord before he moved in with Sui Zhou, the man who plotted to kill his own wife and then let his son go to prison in his stead, and let him die there before fleeing with his new pregnant mistress. Turns out that Li Man is actually affiliated to the White Lotus Sect.

After his identity is exposed as they are all trapped in the tomb, Li Man takes Tang Fan hostage, but Sui Zhou to the rescue! As they try to get out alive while battling the creature physically, and also dealing with scheming mastermind Li Man and less-than-cooperative subordinates, Tang Fan and Sui Zhou really have their work cut out for them.

*Do read the previous highlight Ch. 60-61 to find out who the village chief and Tang Fan’s uncooperative mofo of a subordinate Yin Yuan Hua are, and also a refresh on the case XD Qian San Er is a young boy, thief-turned-ally that follows Tang Fan from this case onwards and later works for him

*No major Fanzhou ROMANTIC moments in this chapter, but they’re trying to save each other and trying to outwit the bad guy, and also the creature is this huge-ass crocodile that eats people lmao, and they’re trapped in the tomb ;-;

Sort of MAJOR FANZHOU MOMENT AT THE END of this chapter!!!

Introduction Post | Masterpost

—

Highlights under the cut

Li Man is just realising how extremely useful a hostage is, and before he gets a chance to put his hand on Tang Fan’s neck, a sharp pain comes from his exposed back. He cannot help but cry out in pain, and then the person he caught to play his human shield earlier is gone. The side of his arm has taken a heavy hit, and the pain he feels has him loosening the hold on his blade uncontrollably.

It is but a short moment, but the situation has already changed significantly.

Li Man is originally a businessman and his skills are nowhere better than Tang Fan’s. Otherwise, he would not have been unsure about how much force to use when he took up an axe earlier to slash at others. His two henchmen, however, are clearly more skilled than he is, as faced with the closing in of the Embroidered Uniform Guards, they managed to struggle a little before being forced to surrender.

“What are you guys doing here!” Li Man glares at the person before him in disbelief after his arms are restrained ruthlessly behind his back.

Fate is playing tricks on him. All that he put Tang Fan through earlier is now being applied on himself.

An Embroidered Uniform Guard walks over and then pushes the stone door open slowly. Under Li Man and his henchmen’s glares, Pang Qi walks in with a large gait from the outside, bringing with him Qian San Er and others. The stone door then closes shut heavily again.

The threat they felt from the approaching tomb beast earlier seems like just an illusion.

Sui Zhou personally unties Tang Fan, and asks, concerned, “You’re alright?”

“I’m good,” Tang Fan shakes his head, and then looks around his surroundings.

From the decor, the huge hall they are at is actually at the core of Marquis Gong’s tomb. the coffin in the center is where Marquis Gong’s corpse is located, and the floral patterns on top of the coffin confirm Tang Fan’s earlier guess, that this is indeed the tomb of a former Marquis of the Qin empire.

However, because this central hall’s space is larger, on the left and right there are accompanying side halls that emulate the place the tomb owner was staying in when he was alive. Li Man and the rest of them only lit up a single light. As a result, aside from this small circular area near the light, other parts of this hall are shrouded in darkness.

Stuck in such an environment, it is natural to look towards the light and avoid the darkness, so people consciously turn their eyes towards where there is light, and when these eyes look towards other places, they will be temporarily blinded.

Sui Zhou and his men made use of this to first hide within the accompanying side halls, holding their breaths so they could strike accurately when Li Man’s defences are down.

Although Li Man also realises this, he is still in disbelief, as he always seems to lose to his own plans and fall into Tang Fan’s hands repeatedly.

“This is impossible, my people definitely lured you away, how did you run here from that side?”

Sui Zhou does not pay him any mind, and looks first to Tang Fan instead.

Tang Fan jokes, “Because Sui-zhenfushi is both smart and legendary in combat, and common people are unable to see through him!”

Sui Zhou’s eyes reveal a tinge of mirth, but when he turns towards Li Man again, his expression has returned to its cold and firm state, “The set up laid in this tomb, we already knew most of it before we came down here…”

Before he can finish, Li Man shouts, “Impossible!”

There is naturally a reason behind him saying that. When royals are buried, to prevent tomb robbers, not only must there not be any details left behind for transfer, sometimes even the architects behind the tomb construction have to be killed as well. Or even like how Cao Cao did it, setting up 72 decoy tombs - this was all to confuse the people left and absolutely prevent robberies.

Although doing this may not be entirely effective, everyone has always done it this way in history, so being a little more careful and meticulous will not go wrong.

This tomb is located under the Yong Hou Tomb, and there aren’t many people who know this, not to mention anyone knowing how it’s been set up.

Facing Li Man’s ‘I am cultured so you better stop lying to me’ expression, Tang Fan patiently explains, “Before I became an official, I once wandered the world and came across the region of Shan Xi. There are plenty of tombs there, and it is said that the Zhou royal family’s tomb has long been emptied by local raiders, but the burial mounds and archaeological site are still intact. Under my observations, I realised that the structure of these sites are more similar than different.”

“Yong Hou Tomb only has two levels in the underground palace, this is clearly written by those who have come here before. Ancestor Song Ying was buried in a hurry, and so any secret passages were unable to be built. Although you are not the real Liu Da Niu, but to lure us down here, you put in quite a bit of effort.”

“Not everything you said is fake, at least half of it is real, and Qian San Er did not lie, so combining what the both of you said, then it is not difficult to conclude that when you said there was a third level in this tomb, this means that there has to be another royal member’s tomb.”

“So I took note of this, and looking through local records, I realised that this used to be the land of the Gong Empire, belonging to the Zhou emperor Wang Ji. The Zhou empire practiced gifting their land to accomplished officials, and a small empire like this, all infrastructure must have imitated that of the Zhou royal family’s, including their tombs.”

Li Man continues, “So you applied the set up you saw in the Zhou dynasty’s tombs in Shan Xi over here.”

Tang Fan nods in agreement, “Exactly, but this is equivalent only to trying to draw a tiger by looking at a cat - it is not possible for every tomb to look exactly the same, and even if we know the gist of the set up, there will definitely be differences in between. For example, the traps in this tomb, we couldn’t have known this first. But it is precisely at this moment that you did us a huge favour.”

Li Man’s voice is hoarse, “What favour?”

Tang Fan says, “After we came down, there were plenty of scattered treasures, but there were no bodies. If the creature swallowed the meat and bones together, this I can understand, but from what Qian San Er described, we know that when Li Kui and the rest came down here and fought with the creature, this was surely a nasty, tough fight. So the places that we passed by, it is impossible for them to be so clean. No matter how aggressive and fierce this creature is, one or two limbs or body parts would surely have been left behind. Since this is unnatural, something must be amiss. Someone must have deliberately cleaned this place up in hopes of luring us down here.”

“Very logical,” Li Man says, “And?”

“Since you deliberately lured us here, then you must first ensure your own safety. You couldn’t possibly have allowed yourself to fall prey to the traps, so Sui Zhou and I felt at ease, enough to bring the men down here.”

“I remember that when I was about to kill you, the creature shrieked,” Li Man says, his eyebrows furrowed.

Tang Fan makes a noise of assent, “Qian San Er.”

Hearing his name being called, Qian San Er walks out from the dark calmly, and then shoots Tang Fan a grin, deliberately sucking up to Tang Fan. Then, he brings his hand to the side of his mouth.

A chilling sound echoes, and this is exactly the sound of a ghost crying that they heard earlier!

Li Man and his two henchmen’s eyes go wide.

Qian San Er straightens, his chest protruding outwards and traces of smug delight on his face, “I don’t only know how to steal!”

One must know that his ventriloquism skills are top notch in the Huang He Gang, otherwise he wouldn’t have been brought over here by his shifu to keep watch. Although he was not of much help, but at critical moments, it’s not that he cannot be assigned tasks, and case in point, Li man and the rest were deceived.

The plan was actually very simple. Li Man planned to lure Sui Zhou and his men away and was prepared to first kill Tang Fan and Yin Huan Hua. Who knew that Sui Zhou and the rest of them were already prepared and tackled his scheme with one of their own? Through the White Lotus Sect disciple who wanted to lure them away, they instead managed to figure out all the traps here.

Plus the preparation that Tang Fan made prior to this, having understood the environment and infrastructure before coming down here, as long as they walked about, they would no longer be confused by the misleading traps.

At this point, Sui Zhou and the rest realised that the Tang Fan and Yin Yuan Hua (who were trailing) behind them have vanished. And as Tang Fan knows Sui Zhou, Sui Zhou knows Tang Fan equally well. He knew that Tang Fan would surely think of ways stall for time and await their rescue. The only problem was how they were actually going to meet - And so Sui Zhou asked Qian San Er to mimic the cries of the creatures, all to drive Li Man into the main hall.

And that’s how they have come to the situation before them.

***

Suddenly, Yin Yuan Hua picks up his foot and kicks at Li Man viciously. He demands, “What about the treasures? Where did you hide them all?”

Both of Li Man’s hands are tied up, but he does not get angry at being abruptly kicked to the ground. He only pants, his breaths harsh, “If I tell you, will you guys let me live?”

Yin Huan Hua is still holding a grudge against them for having tied him up earlier and laughs coldly, “All of you tried to rebel and create chaos in the world. It’s already the best case scenario to not have your whole family die to pay for your sins, but you still want to live? if you don’t come clean, just wait to die here!”

As if he heard the biggest joke in history, Li Man suddenly descends into a bout of laughter, and the intensifying pain warps his smile even more.

“What are you laughing at!” Yin Yuan Hua grows cold at his laugh, and almost kicks at him again, but Sui Zhou stops him.

Li Man is laughing uncontrollably, so much so that tears have emerged. He then turns a creepy smile onto Yin Yuan Hua, “I’m laughing at your stupidity! I said so much only to stall for time, so that I may live longer, and then your death sentences will arrive!”

As if in response to Li Man, the moment he finishes speaking, from outside the stone door, an eerie wail resounds from the distance.

Everyone’s expressions change slightly.

Li Man laughs, “I said before that the tomb beasts move when they smell blood and are exceptionally sensitive when it comes to the stench of blood. My blood is bringing them close, and so what if you know all of this? At the end, you still have to die here!”

Heavy thuds echo from outside the stone door, as if an external force is striking against it. In the beginning, the force used was to test the door, but as the door is firm, (the creature) increases its strength. The stone door and the whole hall along with it is struck with so much force that they are shaking slightly, scattering plenty of dust to the floor.

Li Man is still laughing, “This secret will forever be buried here, you will never make it out!”

The back of his head is hit heavily by Pang Qi, “You will also have to die here, what rubbish are you saying, think of something!”

Li Man sneers, “I am indebted to the almighty Sect, without it, there would be no wealthy and successful Li Man. My time to repay my debt has come, and to be able to drag all of you to die with me, I will not die in vain!”

While he is speaking, the stone door is again struck heavily (from the outside)! Originally, this door can only be opened with some clever handling, and for humans this is not a difficult thing, but for a ferocious beast, the stone door before its eyes is an obstacle. However, the tomb guarding beast outside clearly is intelligent, and after repeated strikes proved futile, it gradually stops its attacks and instead shifts to other various methods to try.

The people inside the stone room originally thought that even though they are temporarily unable to leave, the beast cannot enter either. As long as they patiently waited for time to pass, after it lost its patience it would leave naturally, but when they see the stone door being pushed open slowly from outside, they cannot help but be terrified.

A black claw that is as sharp as that of a bird’s, but is a few times larger than a normal bird’s, presses in from the gap made by the door. With the force the beast exhibited outside (earlier), if the claw caught onto one of them, it’s likely their heads would split on the spot.

Once they get to this thought, everyone shudders.

Sui Zhou yells, “Hurry go and hold the door!”

Even without him saying this, many people have already rushed forward and are using their bodies to completely jam the door.

However, the external force is too great, and even though everyone is expelling a majority, if not all of their strength, they only manage to push the door back by just a bit. Before any of them can heave a sigh of relief, the stone door is slammed against hard once again!

A lot of them were still stuck to the door, and are shocked immediately, their four limbs going numb and their strength leaving them.

Another strike from outside!

Once more!

And one more time!

Sui Zhou says grimly, “Prepare the hand cannons!”

With this reminder, a lot of them then remember that they did bring their hand cannons with them. Embroidered Uniform Guards with the hand cannons frantically stuff gunpowder inside, and nervously point the barrels towards the stone door area, waiting for this door to collapse…

And yet, whatever negative thoughts they have are realized, and before they are fully prepared, the door is already unable to withstand this huge force. It splits into two pieces and collapse towards the back. Some of them did not evade this in time and are trapped right there and then.

Along with the stone door being destroyed entirely, the heavy stench of blood blows inwards, and everyone almost throws up.

The only candle flame in the hall is extinguished.

***

Yin Yuan Hua leans against the wall as he shakes, and is exposed and unguarded as the creature’s claws sweep over. His face is flushed white, his eyes staring ahead, forgetting to even react to this.

At this time, it is Tang Fan who is right next to him, who reaches out with a hand and tugs him over. Yin Yuan Hua stumbles and barely dodges the claws, and the sharp tips of those claws swipe over the wall, leaving behind three deep claw marks.

If he was still standing there, then right this moment, there would be another corpse with a cut open belly.

Yin Yuan Hua shakily pants as he depends on the wall for support, not quite believing that he managed to escape from death’s clutches then.

“Go to the side halls!” Tang Fan shouts, totally different from his usual gentle, polite self.

He expended a lot of energy earlier to tug Yin Yuan Hua (out of harm’s way), and at this point, his pallor is not any better than the other man’s.

But the next moment, danger descends once again.

The beast seems to have realised that there are two more easy targets here, and it turns its head, its mouth opening wide and sharp white teeth close in.

From Tang Fan saving Yin Yuan Hua to the creature turning its head over, all these happened in merely a blink of an eye!

The beast is unable to bite at two people at the same time, so its very first target is Yin Yuan Hua. His face remains pale, but this time his reaction seems to be faster than the previous time.

There is no time to flee - the creature’s body is much larger than theirs, and so it has already blocked off all their paths for escape.

This time, Yin Yuan Hua finally reacts.

He chooses to tug Tang Fan over on one hand and hide behind him on the other, prepared to use Tang Fan as a human shield to slow down the beast’s progress. After that he will plan his retreat.

He did this in a flash, and no one would have expected him to do this!

Tang Fan is no longer able to hide or dodge in time! Seeing that his shoulder is about to be bitten off like what happened to an Embroidered Uniform Guard earlier, something flashes in Tang Fan’s eyes, and then the creature’s teeth bites onto a xiuchun blade instead!

It’s Sui Zhou!

At the last moment against all odds, Sui Zhou rushed over and with just the force of a single arm, he blocked the beast’s attack with the blade in his hand!

The edge of the blade causes the beast’s soft mouth to bleed, and it bites on the blade in a rage, then throws ruthlessly, sending Sui Zhou flying to the wall right that moment.

Sui Zhou falls heavily, and spits out a mouthful of blood.

“Guang Chuan!” Tang Fan rushes over to pick him up, his eyes going so wide in fury that they are about to split.

Sui Zhou’s face is as white as joss paper, his eyes shut tight. He is likely to have injured his internal organs, and doesn’t even have the strength to talk at that moment.

The warm body in his arms is pressed so close to him, but in that moment, Tang Fan has this sudden fear and uneasiness at the thought of losing him.

The earlier half of Tang Fan’s life - his parents died earlier and his older sister married out of the city. He thought he was alone, that he had no ties or worries, living freely without restrictions. He also thought that even if he was unable to continue being an official, at most he would just put up his hat and leave.

In this lifetime, he thought that perhaps there was nothing he could not let go.

But right this moment, Tang Fan then realises just how much Sui Zhou means to him in his heart.

So much that he cannot bear the reality of losing the other.

#tsomd #cheng hua's fourteenth year #成化十四年 #suitang #fanzhou #fanzhou highlights #as always i'm sorry it takes me forever!!!#to update hahah #cheng hua shi si nian

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neworderscans · 3 years

Text

Electronic - AOL Webchat, 07/30/96 (Bernard and Johnny answering fan questions in a chat using the same handle, I've made minor edits for clarity purposes - archive link in full here)

Max Warner [AOL Webchat host/moderator] : We'll be starting in just a few minutes. We are having some minor technical difficulties.

Max Warner: Johnny and Bernard will be using the screen name Elctrnic.

Max Warner: Just a couple more minutes.... we swear!

Max Warner: We're here with Johnny Marr and Bernard Sumner of ELECTRONIC.

Elctrnic: Hello From Bernard & Johnny

Max Warner: Here we go! after a few of those [Online host] Bringing together mainstays of two of the most influential bands of the last 15 years Bernard Sumner of New Order and Johnny Marr of The Smiths. The music of Electronic has exceeded even the high expectations that such a creative partnership undoubtedly engenders.

Max Warner: From Nexland: Question: Barney, Johnny Can U tell me the Story with George Michael. Where Did U meet Him???? it's funny because i saw a picture of Peter Hook with Barry White. That is Cool

Elctrnic: He was cutting his new record at the same studio we were in, hes a nice guy actually

Max Warner: From Embody123: Question: Bernie, what's the nicest thing about working with Marr (Marr: Vice Versa)?

Elctrnic: Johnny never calls me Bernie

Max Warner: From NewOrder3: Question: I would like to know whether any concerts will be scheduled in 1996 and who is the author of the paragraphs in the CD of "raise the pressure"

Elctrnic: At the moment were looking for the right musicians,we'd like to see everybody.

Elctrnic: Bernard wrote the text inside the album$

Max Warner: From SeanJorda: Question: Will either of you be doing any production work in the near future? Barney: I just listened to your SHARK VEGAS, TECHNOTRONIC, and BEAT CLUB tracks today.

Elctrnic: You really know your stuff. I would like to concentrate on Electronic $

Max Warner: From BigBoy666: Question: What do _you_ listen to?

Elctrnic: We mostly listen to European dance music and older good rock stuff, Stones 2000 Light Years, Bowie/Eno Be My Wife$

Max Warner: From APinto65: Question: How did it happen that Neil Tennant did not join up with you on this CD? It's still is fabulous, but I was just curious?

Elctrnic: Electronic is Johnny and Benard.Neil is a guest artist,Johnny is on the new P.S.Bs album

Elctrnic: On this album Karl Bartos from Kraftwek is the guest

Max Warner: From Nexland: Question: Barney, Johnny How are u Tonight???

Elctrnic: Really Groovy

Max Warner: From SeanJorda: Question: How did you guys like TRAINSPOTTING, and Barney- did you like the use of TEMPTATION in the film?

Elctrnic: Its a great film, it opens friday in the U.S. I was proud to be associated with it

Max Warner: From AJ Wells: Question: Hey Barney... how is the jogging coming along? Any Olympic hopes?

Elctrnic: Im meeting up with Ben Johnsons dealer tonight so I should be o.k

Max Warner: From Embody123: Question: Marr: what do you think of MOJO magazine's listing you in the top 25 greatest guitar players of all time?

Elctrnic: Whos this Hendrix bloke ?

Max Warner: From LLabo2909: Question: Johnny, will you ever be joining Morrissey for a reunion tour with the Smiths. Please say yes!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Elctrnic: Sure Boris, do you see any quiffs about?

Max Warner : From AJ Wells: Question: Barney... what ever happened to Section 25? Or Shark Vegas? Or Stexx? Or 52 Street?

Elctrnic: All in mental institutions I think, honestly!

Max Warner: From BBMountai: Question: I've heard that Johnny's been websurfing lately and was wondering if Bernard has also? And what do you both think of the web sites fans create about you?

Elctrnic: Johnny's quite into the web.We intend to make our sites more personal and as informative as possible.we're into it

Max Warner: From Jester000: Question: Johnny I was wondering what gave you hte idea for the whales used in "last night I dreamt...." thanks, glenn

Elctrnic: Bernards getting his browser together when he gets back to U.K

Max Warner: From Embody123: Question: How long did the new album take?

Elctrnic: The sound is actually a protest march sound effect slowed right down.Angry unemplyed.

Max Warner: From PULPTALEN: Question: What is the most succesful song in your career?

Elctrnic: The new album took two years to make but it only feels like one year and eleven months

Max Warner: From Annabel50: Question: hows life in the fast world?

Elctrnic: Slow

Elctrnic: How soon is Monday

Max Warner: From CADS1: Question: are you guys in nyc

Elctrnic: Yes

Max Warner: From Cphel: Question: Bernard- Is New Order no more? Johnny and Bernard-Why no PSB involvement?

Elctrnic: Not quite suree abot that one. P.S.Bs were guests.

Max Warner: From NEXLAND: Question: Do u feel any pressure with an new album??????

Elctrnic: I hope thats not a joke ,

Max Warner: From Femboheme: Question: I love, actually worship the new album. I also love the b-sides, do you have any good instrumentals on any upcomming singles for us?

Elctrnic: Were gonna do some new stuff soon. Were really glad you like the new Album,Thanks.

Max Warner : From CanadaBil: Question: You guys have had awesome careers!! I've been a fan of both since day one. Bernie, is it true that you (New Order) own a bar on one of the islands off the coast of Spain? I'd like to go. Thanks!!

Elctrnic: We dont own a bar in Spain, well not that I know of anyway.We recorded Technique in Ibiza/Spain

Max Warner: From Jcorker: Question: Bernard-Any relation to Sting?

Elctrnic: Hes my great Grandfather actually!

Max Warner: From KCleary: Question: Your music style is not necessarily the most accessible or popular in today's music scene when compared with what's on the charts - i.e. grunge, hard rock. Do you see that as a positive Question or negative when you go into the studio and/or when you tour?

Elctrnic: There should always be a place for someone who is different

Max Warner: From CADS1: Question: at the end of get the message what are you saying

Elctrnic: I am saying "Living on peanuts ain't my scene,shame that word rhymes with mean"

Max Warner: From FBrowniii: Question: do you guys care what radio thinks of your eclectic mix of styles? (we won't tell the record company execs :)

Elctrnic: No

Max Warner: From Femboheme: Question: Who writes the lyrics, who music? Is it a mix or is there a majority-one does more of one thing than the other?

Elctrnic: We both write the music and Bernard writes the Lyrics

Max Warner: From NewOrder3: Question: to Bernard: what do you think of the compilation: Tribute to Joy Division ? are you flattered ?

Elctrnic: I was touched by the gesture

Max Warner : From LLabo2909: Question: Johnny as usual you have great taste in music. is it true that you went guitar shopping with Noel from Oasis? the best band in the world!

Elctrnic: Yeah I did,but in future Noel can take his cheque book

Max Warner: From Lucozade: Question: heard you're both insatiable gossips. any new dish?

Elctrnic: O.K , Prince Charles is Ice T,s lover!, it's true!

Max Warner: From Bridge bo: Question: would you guys consider yourselves closer to christians or zen budhists??

Elctrnic: Were from The Church Of The "Not To Bothered"

Max Warner: We're running out of time... 2 more Questions.

Max Warner : From HammoFam: Question: How do you compare the bands of the 90's w/the bands of the 80's? Honestly, do you miss the 80's?

Elctrnic: We both really miss Flok Of Seagulls and Wang Chung! it's really sad

Max Warner: AND here's the last Question, from SJacobs62: Question: what is your favorite band?

Elctrnic: We dont really have one favourite band.Were going now,thanks to everybody whos supported us in the past and hopefully well be in touch one way or other soon. Take care

Elctrnic: from Johnny and Bernard

Max Warner: Bernard and Johnny, thanks for coming.

Elctrnic: Cheers!

#electronic #bernard sumner #johnny marr #text #misc #1996 #web

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zhansww · 4 years

Note

Hey, I'm new to this side of the fandom. I was a MDZS fan but I fell in love with CQL and Xiao Zhan. I try to avoid rl cp's because of experiences with fandom. However, it's impossible to ignore WY's crush on XZ. I thought of the relationship as brotherly rivals/one-sided crush from yibo. Until I saw them on stage at the tencent awards, and with the release of all these bts vids it doesn't seem like a crush it seems very much mutual and acted on. SO here I am on tumblr checking things out

In the last 48 hours I have been all over yizhan tumblr and I really love your blog because you have a very rational pov. If you don't mind me asking how did you get into this cp? what makes you think they are still together after the ao3 incident? Do you have a preference for XZ or WY and does that make it hard being a CP fan? Is there a master list you can send me to? Sorry for asking so many questions, if any of them offend please don't anwer. Thank you in advanced.

Hello there and welcome to this side of the fandom~ 😄

Thank you so much for liking my blog. It’s always really humbling for me to read such praise //// About me, trying to think rationally when it comes to YiZhan; that is something that is very important imo. These are real people that I am making such a bold statement of, after all. It would be a disservice to them and to myself if I didn’t at least try to judge what they have in an unbiased, reasonable way. On that note, I know that a lot of cp fans fell in love with YiZhan so they just believed in them first and looked for evidence second. For me, it was quite different. I became their fan in late summer 2019. It didn’t take me long to come across cp fans who actually believed that XZ and WYB are a couple irl but I just rolled my eyes at that and dismissed most of their so-called evidence. Me, I wasn’t even sure if they were genuine friends at that point. The first thing I found out about that gave me a clue was the theory that XZ gave Yibo the ox-head necklace he was wearing back then (from June 2019 until August 2020). The lip reading is what made me believe it and I thought “oh so they are friends in real life, too. how cute”. But this was around the same time that Yibo started hiding the necklace which is something that gave me pause but that I explained with “he must be annoyed with cp fans, assuming it’s a romantic gift”. It basically kept going like this for months. I found excuses for anything that confused me at first, I really didn’t want to budge from my belief that ggdd are good friends. The more I found out about them individually and about certain theories that actually made sense, the more that belief crumbled. Until weibo night 2020 which was when I had to concede that assuming YiZhan are friends just doesn’t make sense. I still remember how oddly defeated I felt. I think it’s such a bittersweet thing. They found love but they are unable to share it, to love freely. I feel for them. And I am rooting for them so badly. That was when I started to believe. I wasn’t certain until May 2020. On the 20th, a flight to Shanghai showed on gg’s schedule and dd was set to fly there on that day, too. Other than dd’s arrival at the airport that morning, no one saw either of them that day at any of the places where fans waited, hoping to see them. There were photos of them on the 21st in Shanghai but not the 20th. And then of course, there was dd’s own confirmation that he spent that day with XZ in his weibo story. To be clear, I don’t think that any one thing about YiZhan is or should be enough to make one certain they’re a couple. For me, that particular incident was the final straw, so to say. It’s what made me completely sure about their relationship. I haven’t had any doubt since. I guess this also kinda answers your second question about what makes me think they’re still together after what happened last February. There are other hints that they (and mainly Yibo) dropped last year that let us know they are still very much in love. I elaborated a bit on that here, you can also check the posts I have in this tag for actual examples.

I don’t have a preference. It’s still so funny to me when bxg say they have a bias between XZ and WYB. I genuinely can’t relate. Ehm, I could imagine XZ-biased cp fans to have it harder, though, cuz bj/yx fans are sort of representing this cp’s fandom as a whole and generally speaking, the bj/yx fandom doesn’t seem to be able to separate wang/xian from bj/yx which leads to them, willfully misinterpreting gg’s character and ggdd’s dynamic just to fit their misguided idea of what a queer relationship between two men should look like irl. You may not know what exactly I’m referring to cuz you’re new but I don’t doubt that you’ll see soon enough :/ Personally, I prefer zsww and lsfy fans. With bj/yx fans, I barely ever know what I’m getting beforehand.

I assume you’re referring to a master list of all of XZ and WYB’s content over the last years or so? I think this site might be good but it’s all in Chinese so I don’t know for sure. Hmmm.... this thread might be a start. Also, these yt accounts: BXCnSub, Prime110W and wenwen1111. I'd recommend viki and Youtube for watching their shows. Sorry I can’t be more helpful. I remember coming across an actual master list a few months ago but I didn’t save it. If I should find it again, I’ll link it. Sorry. >.<

#ask #halobey

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wild-aloof-rebel · 4 years

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a schitt’s creek fashion cheat sheet for fic writing

there comes a point in so many fics where you need a designer/brand name to throw in for a random item of clothing someone is wearing, and it can be really hard to know what to pick if you don’t know a ton about fashion. how do you decide which designer to mention for that new sweater david’s been eyeing? which one for the shoes alexis is currently packing in her suitcase?

to that end, here is a very basic guide to choosing designers and brands that fit the aesthetic of the characters, match what they wear on the show, and thus make you sound like you know what you’re talking about...

david

is it a funky shape (weird draping, extra fabric, etc.), or does it have a drop-crotch? without a doubt, rick owens

is it neoprene and/or does it have lightning bolts or geometric colorblocking? most of the time, neil barrett

is it just a random other sweater or sweatshirt? your safest bet in most cases is givenchy

other designers you’d be safe to include in the mix, as they appear several times each include saint laurent, alexander mcqueen, valentino, and dries van noten. also, acne studios, though most of what david wears of theirs has more of a streetwear vibe, so don’t use it for like, fancy mohair sweaters, etc.

skirted pants? rick owens or dries van noten

other jeans? rick owens, dries van noten, and neil barrett

shoes? 80% of the ones he wears are rick owens, so that’s always a safe choice

the leather jacket from our cup runneth over, sebastien raine, etc. is rick owens, while the one from the wingman is acne studios

his wedding look is entirely thom browne

and the tux from the s6 promos, if you need that for any reason, is burberry

his silver rings are maison margiela (the gold ones are custom made)

alexis

dresses and skirts? isabel marant is your best bet

other designers you’re safe to include are derek lam, chloe, proenza schouler, dolce and gabbana, and reformation

shoes? mostly pretty evenly mixed amongst céline, chloe, isabel marant, prada, and valentino (i know it can be tempting to say louboutin because they’re so well-known, but alexis doesn’t actually wear them much)

purses? chloe and miu miu are popular options

moira

the safest bet for just about anything for moira--dresses, shirts, jackets, shoes, whatever--is alexander mcqueen, doubly so if it’s on the funkier side of things

other good options for pants, skirts, and shirts are sandra angelozzi and givenchy

other good options for dresses include balenciaga, junya watanabe, msgm, and haider ackermann

other shoes are mostly a mix of prada, alaia, balenciaga, céline, and miu miu, plus moira specifically mentions alexander wang and fendi in reference to her shoes in various eps

purses? prada and proenza schouler both appear often

johnny

shirts and suits? mostly either ermengildo zegna or canali

i honestly haven’t ever paid enough attention to johnny’s shoes to even try to identify them, but zegna would again be a pretty safe bet or another conservative/traditional, italian option like berluti

patrick

jeans? levis or paige, exclusively

most of his shirts/sweaters are largely unidentifiable, but he does wear a jacket from j.crew in moira rosé, so probably think brands along that line

his wedding look is hugo boss

they all certainly wear other designers/brands on occasion, but this gives you a solid base at least if you just need a name to throw out.

on the other hand, if you’re looking to name the designers of specific looks they’ve worn on the show, i’ve got a quick list of all david’s [identified] sweaters, and @holmesapothecary has posts by season with pictures for all of david’s clothes by episode. i’ve also got a post just about david’s shoes if you need that. @patrickbluer has screenshots of all of patrick’s outfits by episode, if you need any of that for reference. various other things have been id’d in my #fashion reference tag. you can also check sites like spotern or wornontv. and finally of course, if you ever can’t find something in any of these places, don’t hesitate to ask me, and i’ll see what i can do!

#fashion reference #schitt's creek #schitts creek #fashion #david rose #alexis rose #moira rose #johnny rose #patrick brewer #fashion is just such a big part of the show #so inevitably you end up having to write something about it somewhere #even if you don't know much about it #and that's hard!#it's hard to write things you don't know #so hopefully this is helpful in some way #putting all this random knowledge in my head to some kind of use lol #and my spreadsheets of course haha #reference

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jcisthebestfightme · 4 years

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BJYX Song #7: Kepler

BJYX Song Series List

Disclaimer: All my own delusion.

Ahhhhh I’m so in love with gg’s love confession. They’re so sweet. Just what I need right now.

So we’ve finally reached “Kepler” by gg’s idol Stephanie Sun. Gg sang this song during the CQL fan-meeting. A lot of people know about this song because he changed the lyrics (changed lyrics will be bolded). I will analyze only the part he sang and he lyrics he chose because that’s what he wants to express.

So this song was said to be for XFX (gg’s fans) because gg has said in the past during his X-Nine days that he wants to sing this for his fan. I agree and I think this songs is for his fans. So what does that have to do with dd? Well, who is gg’s #1 fan? Yes, dd is gg’s fan and vice versa. To me, the first part of the song is sang for all his fans and then the chorus narrows in on one specific fan.

youtube

等不到你成為我最閃亮的銀河 (Won’t be able to wait for you to become my brightest galaxy)

This line is what tells me that gg sang it for his fans. The original lyrics is actually “star” instead of "galaxy”. Gg changed it to “galaxy” since there are many stars there so he’s referring to a group of people, not one.

我依然願意借給你我的光 (I will still lend you my light)

投射給你那道源自於我的光芒 (Shining on you, that light that belongs to me.)

粼粼的掛在遙遠的天上 (Sparkling, suspended on the distant sky above)

This part is about him being a star and giving back to his fans, regardless of whether they support him or not (gg is so warm!) He changed the lyrics here to express what he can give, instead of the original which is about the brightness of the other party.

當你沉浸天空那條冰冷的銀河 (When you immerse in that cold galaxy)

粼粼的波光夠不夠暖活你 (Are the sparkling waves enough to keep you warm?)

當你沉浸那道源自於我的光芒 (When you immerse in that light that comes from me)

我依然願意為你來歌唱 (I am still willing to sing for you)

Gg is again talking how he’s singing for his fans. He was hesitant about some lyrics and missed some parts, probably because it’s hard to sing a song with a new set of lyrics if they’re already used to the old one so he’s trying to remember what he changed.

一閃一閃亮晶晶好像你的身體 (Twinkle twinkle little star, just like your body)

藏在眾多孤星之中還是找得到你 (Hidden amongst numerous lone stars, but I can still find you)

Here, in the chorus is where I think he transitioned from singing to a group of fans to singing to one person. All the words here are directed for a singular person, now talking about 1 star instead of a galaxy and pointing out this person’s “body” (it would honestly be strange and a bit creepy if he’s referring to the body of a group of fans.) Also the song talks about finding a “lone star” amongst a bunch of stars so it’s no longer a collective he’s addressing.

掛在天上放光明反射我的孤寂 (Suspended in the sky shining, reflecting my loneliness)

提醒我我深愛著一顆寂寞的星星 (Reminding, that I’m in love deeply with a lonely star)

Some people said that gg just sang the wrong lyrics because he forgot the actual lyrics. But we already saw that he’s been changing the lyrics throughout this song. Also this line is too oddly specific for him to just make it up on the spot because he forgot the original lyrics. Usually when singers sing the wrong lyrics, they tend to sing lyrics from a different part of the song in the wrong place, especially if the tune is the same. This line “I’m in love with a lonely” does not show up at all in the original song. Furthermore, the word “in love with deeply” (深愛) does not show up at all in the song so its existence is deliberate, intentional, and purposeful. And we know he’s addressing one person and not a group of fans because the word “一顆” translates literally to “one”.

I don’t think I need to explain who this “lonely star” is. Instead, I want to talk about why gg chose this song. The motif “loneliness” comes up here again. Both gg and dd probably feels pretty lonely in the entertainment industry. However, this song tells us that these two lonely stars finally found each other, and shine brightly for each other. Sometimes I wonder why they’re so attached to each other and then I remember that in the convoluted entertainment industry, especially with their accelerated rise to stardom, ggdd can only trust each other. Friends, whether new or from the past, can trying to gain something from you. People around at work can be trying to sell you out. So even though they’re surrounded by people, they’re actually very lonely. But they can look towards each other. I also think that two lonely stars in the sky reminds me of how far apart physically ggdd usually are at work. They don’t appear together on stage so it may seem like they’re on the other side of the galaxy. But when they’re on stage individually, they’re shining so brightly that the other person can see them from far away.

The motif of “star” comes up in ggdd’s relationship as well. Gg likes to draw eight pointed stars and dd has also worn a brooch with an eight-pointed star that looks similar to ones gg draws because word in Chinense is “8 (=Bo)” “wang” “xing (star)”. Gg has also changed a regular five pointed star into four pointed because the word for that is “wang” star. The recent black leopard drawing that dd bragged about on 8 social media sites showcase a four-pointed star even though his original motorcycle uniform is a regular 5 pointed star. This tells us that “star”, especially “wang” stars, have a very special meaning for for ggdd.

I went back to the song to listen to the original lyrics. This same tune show up in the song three time, the first two times is “I am also a lonely star” while the third time and last line of the song is “I am no longer a lonely star.” Like I mentioned, sometimes singers will change lyrics from 1 part of the song to another if it’s a same tune, by accident or on purpose. At first, I thought that gg changed it from “I am also a lonely star” because he doesn’t feel alone anymore. With is true if he has dd, and true if he’s talking about having fans with him. However, I think if he just want to reference that he’s not alone anymore because of fans, he would probably sing “I am no longer a lonely star” which already exist in the song. Instead, he purposefully added “I am in love with one lonely star” which makes it just that much more deliberate. And like I mentioned already, the singular “one” makes it less likely that the is addressing the fandom. Also, shifting from “I am no longer a lonely star” to “I’m in love with a lonely star,” he shifts the focus onto the person the person that he loves, and makes the love more active. He’s not just saying he himself is now passively no longer lonely, but that he’s actively loving someone.

So what was dd’s response to the changed lyrics? I watched a more direct fan-cam that has dd in the background when gg is singing this part. Dd was indeed smiling and looking at gg when this last line was sang. However, the person sitting next to gg was also talking to him at that moment. Some people say that dd was just smiling/laughing from something that person say. What I find interesting is that during that line, dd turned to look at gg directly. It was after the line was over that he turn to talk to the person next to him. One theory is that maybe he’s talking to the person about the changed lyrics. We all know dd likes to brag so maybe he’s discussing it?

I don’t think we can tell which theory is true. However, I do believe gg is trying to give a message to dd because after he sang this song, he went back to his seat by backing up in tiny steps and had a shy smile on this face, almost like he’s embarrassed. He was also looking at dd the whole time he was backing up and dd was smiling very sweetly at him. So gg sent a message. Whether dd received it, we’ll never know (although so many people talk about this changed lyrics dd probably saw it analyzed on the Internet already.) His smile after gg sang the song tells me that he did receive it though.

Thank you gg for singing this song for us and for dd. I’m happy that even though they’re lone stars, they’re lonely together.

#yizhan #bjyx

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hitsuackerman · 4 years

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Unpredictable (Overhaul x Reader) pt.20

a/n: i... smell... drama...

warnings: this cannot be read solo

Links: part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5, part 6, part 7, part 8, part 9, part 10, part 11, part 12, part 13, part 14, part 15, part 16, part 17, part 18, part 19, part 21

Masterlist to my other fics: here :)

Overhaul’s waiting list: @jjk-biased @infinite-universe-love @dirtypride @blackymomo03 @azzie @purple-rabanito @meximorrita @awesomeee19 @celestial-kanzakii @laure-lo @team-wang-puppy @aydience-world @choros-main-hoe @colorseeingchick @but-kairis-not-that-smart(i cant seem to tag again :( hope this lands in your timelines!)

Keeping both your palms rested on your thighs, it took a lot of energy to regulate your steadily increasing blood pressure. Not seeing Overhaul for almost a week made you realize just how gorgeous his face was, despite it being partially covered by the beak. From time to time, you would send a death glare to Tsukauchi.

It also took a considerable amount of dedication not to look at him. Thankful that peripheral views exist, you were sure how his golden eyes would linger on your silently panicking figure. Tapping your foot was definitely not helping.

“So that’s the rerun for later.” Tsukauchi ended the presentation and closed the projector. He, too, could feel the increasing tension in the room. Yet, this had been a part of his plan. Seeing how you were down made him move and decide that it was time for him to intervene. He also took note on how Overhaul made zero effort in concealing his stares. “Any questions?”

“The back route seems a bit faulty.” One of the officers commenced making Tsukauchi reach for the printed copy. “Is there an alternate route?”

“We can opt to use the fire exit but it would be too obvious on our part. I specifically chose this route since there are less hindrances along the way and it would be easy to be lost in the crowd.”

“I’m pretty sure the Fukuo Kai will be heavily guarding the back route.”

“On the contrary,” Overhaul spoke up. Each person jumping at the sudden intrusion of his muffled voice. “The back route will make things easier. If your lot wants to narrowly escape then being cornered will be a good thing. Those bastards aren’t the best when they get separated from their mother hen.”

Hearing him speak sent shivers down your spine. Gritting your teeth, you pushed your quirk a bit more to relax yourself. Personal emotions aside, he had a point.

“He just sided with Tsuka-kun.” Shinezu leaned in and whispered. “Is this a fever dream?”

“No. Take the sociopath away, he’s relatively stable.” You praised him. “One of the best villains to work with, in all honesty.”

“Oh right, you were paired up with him before the… holy smokes this guy’s got balls. Entering a precinct despite having the heroes planning to capture him? What I’d give to have his confidence.”

“You’ll get there, Shinez. Just get out of the office more.” You squeezed his shoulders and earned an enthusiastic huff.

With the briefing now finished, Overhaul excused himself and left the room. The way he turned around without a care in the world, or at least the people in the room, made the butterflies in your stomach tingle with a certain longing that only he could fill. Chewing on your inner cheek, it was getting difficult to stop yourself from standing up and drag him to that one secluded area to pour your pent up emotions.

Shaking your head, you shifted your attention back to the meeting. It had not registered that there were still a few small talks happening. Luckily, no one took it to themselves to converse with you. Listening to their conversations, one of them addressed his concerns about having to work with a villain.

“It goes beyond our belief.” He commented. Forehead wrinkling at the thought of having Overhaul as a team mate.

“He does the job rather well.” Tsukauchi defended him. His words bore no ill-will. “His quirk will be of help later. Also take into consideration that your group will not be in the same area as him. (l/n) and I will be with him guarding the premises.”

“Still. I bet right now, he’s listening in on our conversation. Doesn’t that bother you?” His eyes slid to your silent mouth. Almost as if asking for validation. One that he would not be getting anytime sooner.

“I digress. I’ve worked with him a bit longer than Nao.” You caught his stare and shrugged. “As long as you don’t question his motives, he’ll cooperate. He does what he wants and what we want as long as boundaries are present.”

“Suit yourselves.” Standing up, the 4th division officer commanded the others to follow him into the garage.

Once it was only Tsukauchi, Shinezu, and you inside the room, one more small conversation ensued.

“Do you want him to ride in your car or mine?” Tsukauchi asked.

“Am I missing something?” Shinezu asked with eyes wide open. Head going back and forth from his coworkers.

“You’re the head of the case.” Smiling at your partner, you would respect whatever decision he would make. “Surprise me. I’ll wait by the lobby.”

Leaving the room, you immediately proceeded to your desk and grabbed the necessities. Knowing you would gear up at the site, the trip was short and you were now seated in the driver’s seat. Key inside the ignition hole, the engine warming up to be put to good use. Getting a message that you were to wait by the entrance, you followed suit and squinted when sunlight hit your eyes.

Turning your hazard lights on, you stared at the entrance of the building. Who would be seated beside you in the minutes to come? Hearing your ringtone, you tore your gaze away and grabbed your phone.

“Gei?” This was the last person you’d expect to call you at this time. Gripping your phone a little harder, you waited for him to speak up.

“Yes yes yes, I know! And relax, I’m fine!” He assured you. “I just called to inform you that next week, my schedule will be cleared due to some conference that got rescheduled. I was thinkin we could head out and have some quality time together?”

“What do you have in mind?” Reaching for your planner, you checked your own schedule next week and found you could squeeze in a few hours for him. Looking into your rearview mirror, your eyes widened at the sight of the reflection. “Holy smokes. I gotta go. I’ll call you later, Gei.”

“Is your mission starting? Oh shit! I’m so sorry for disturbing you! Take care and stay safe, (n/n).” He managed to spit out some words before he could hear the door opening through the line.

“I apologize for making you wait.” Overhaul said as he seated himself in the backseat. Closing the seat, his sight remained glued to the outside world. His fingers now playing with the hems of his white gloves.

“GIRL?! IS THA-” Before you would let Overhaul hear what your friend had to say, you ended the call and closed your planner.

Half expecting that Tsukauchi would let him ride your car, you felt your chest tighten at the fact he was in the backseat and not beside you. Perhaps things were really different after that Ackerman name drop. Remembering he had apologized for making you wait, you placed the planner back into your bag and thanked the seat for covering your flushed face.

“It really wasn’t that long.” Seated properly again, you caught his intense golden eyes staring at your mirror. Not one to back out from a staring game, it shocked yourself when you tore your gaze first. A mission was at hand and personal feelings should now be set aside. “You ready?”

With no response, you began the trip to the rendezvous point.

What usually was filled with small talks and easy flowing conversations, the car ride proved to be longer than you wanted. Whatever comfortable silence shared before was now replaced with thick tension. All it takes would be one word to break the ice and perhaps mend the splitting relationship, but intuition told you otherwise. Giving him what he wants would only make things worse.

If it wasn’t for Tsukauchi’s car appearing into view, you would have caved and threw your pride. Parking the car, you watched as he opened the door and immediately closed it. Memories of 6 nights ago flooding your brain. Shaking the thoughts away, you grabbed your phone and made sure to hide the burner phone in the glove compartment.

Once you were met with Tsukauchi and Shinezu, you were bombarded with questions.

“How was the car ride? You’re alive! Did he share any of his ideas and ways of life?” Shinezu asked away.

“It was a silent ride.” You gave your partner a shrug. “He sat in the backseat so I was his chauffeur for the entire duration.”

“Oi, you three! Get in here!” One of the officers from the 4th division called your attention. Gesturing you three to approach the small tent, Tsukauchi nodded and led the group. Inside the small tent were a bunch of monitors displaying the camera footage of the targeted building. “Birdman has entered the building and is heading to his position. So far, the targets are where they’re supposed to be.”

“Keep us updated. It won’t be long before their meeting will start.” Tsukauchi reached for an earpiece and handed each one of you as well. Giving Shinezu final instructions, both of you watched as the shy man exited the tent and appeared on one of the monitors. “He may be shy but he does undercover well.”

“Couldn’t agree more~” You smirked at how Shinez rolled his shoulders and took much more confident strides.

“Ah, (y/n), a word…” Tsukauchi opened the tent doors and led you to his car. “First off, I’m sorry for the sudden intrusion of Overhaul. I just hate seeing you so down these days. I thought that if he were to see you, whatever you see in him might come out and things might turn out for the better.”

“Don’t mind, don’t mind~” Scratching your neck, it was honestly the thought that counted. “I got to see him so I guess it ain’t all that bad. Plus, spoiling him wouldn’t do us any good so…”

“Just talk to him later. Truth be told, he didn’t want to come.” Staring at the building, Tsukauchi couldn’t help but wonder, what would happen once the earpiece would finally establish connection. “When I told him you’d be there, he changed his mind before ending the call.”

The rest of the hours flew by and the meeting finally began. Tsukauchi was listening carefully through the earpiece while you monitored Shinezu. Every now and then, you would glance at the monitor which focused on Overhaul. If things were still the way before, you would bet your money that Overhaul would be texting you on how the meeting was a waste of his time.

Feeling your chest tightening and your shoulders getting heavier by the minute, you focused back on Shinezu’s camera. It was only for a second but you caught how the man flinched. Furrowing your brows, you asked the person in charge to zoom in on Shinezu. Pointing towards the communication device, the officer quickly grabbed it and handed it over. With your thumb grazing the small button, you waited till you were sure the man was in distress. Seeing how he put his hand in his pocket, you clicked on the button.

“Calm down.” Heartbeat slowly picking up its pace. “Scratch your cheek if you’re in need of back up, touch your chin if it’s urgent.”

Hearing what you stated, the officer stood up and ordered the back up team to prepare..

The moment Shinezu touched his chin, you put the device down and gave them the go signal. Jogging to Tsukauchi’s station, you updated him of the current events to which he relayed to Overhaul. Continuing the task, you went back to your seat and pushed the button.

“Backup is on it’s way, Shinez. Leave now.” You watched as the conversation between him and the other man continued. With your finger tapping on the jagged edge of the device, your focus was now on another monitor. Letting out your held breath, relief flooded you when the other man turned his back and made his way back to whatever business he had. Once Shinezu was in a clear spot, the button was pushed once more. “What the heck happened?”

“I heard a gunshot. Presumably on the floor above.” He was now running towards the elevator while loosening his tie.

Looking at the other monitors, the mentioned floors looked fine.

“Shit. Nao!”

“On it.”

Leaving your posts to the other officers, Tsukauchi and you geared up before jogging towards the entrance. Careful of your surroundings.

“How long did you think they rigged the footage?” You asked as you entered the building. It was oddly and unsettling. Focusing on whatever noise would suffice, all you could hear were each of your footsteps on the floors. Clicking your earpiece, you tried to communicate with whoever could be reached. “Anyone from 4. Do you copy?”

“One injured. 5th floor.” One officer managed to reply.

Giving you a signal, Tsukauchi went towards the stairs while you were left to further inspect the ground floor for any possible civilians or members in hiding. Sighing at the turn of events, you took out your handgun and cocked it. Cautiously taking one step after another, you began to check each room and corner till you were sure the vicinity was clear.

Heading to the fire exit, you made your way to the 4th floor. Just as you were about to open the door, the ground shook. Staring at the ceiling, you took note of the looming cracks. Not wanting to remain in the cramped area, you entered the hallway. Not expecting the floor to be somewhat of a wreck, you covered your nose and squint at all the dust.

It took a while to adjust, but the floor was now clearer to your eyes. Coughing a bit, you took more steps forward. Before turning the corner, you stopped in your tracks when you heard a familiar voice.

“Where is he?” The way it was muffled only gave him away. “Tsk. You made such a mess.”

Peaking, you saw his tall figure. Hands void of any gloves.

Hearing a crunching sound behind you, your eyes searched the premises only to be met with emptiness. With your finger resting on the trigger, you were more than ready to defend yourself. Even if it meant shooting a person, the only thing you hated about the job.

“Answer me, you rat. The meeting was going well till that little gesture you did with your hands.” Bending his body down, the tip of his mask touched the trembling person’s cheek. “Don’t make me ask again.”

“H-he went to the rooftop.” The man answered.

“Did you get that?” Overhaul touched his earpiece. It was quiet again. “Hmm? No one’s on the rooftop? Well then, that’s not my problem anymore now is it?”

Taking the small device from his ear, he stared at it before overhauling. Adjusting his jacket, you watched as he knelt and stretched out a hand towards the other person’s neck. Not wanting a mess of things, it was time you intervene.

“I wouldn’t kill him if I were you…” Stepping out of your little corner, you felt your throat parching when he peered at you over his shoulder. Putting the handgun away, you showed him your palms and walked closer to the two men. “We can bring him in and question him in the precinct.”

“This has nothing to do with the Fukuo Kai case.” His gaze now back at the man. “Stay out of it.”

“As much as I want to stay out of it, this man is still a part of the Fukuo Kai. We need him in one piece.”

“I thought you swore not to, I quote, snoop around.” His hand now wrapped around the other person’s neck. Standing to his feet, you watched as the helpless man struggled for oxygen. “Leave.”

“I’d rather not.” You stood your ground. “The others already think negatively of you, despite you lending a helping hand. Just give him to us and I’ll even give you the privilege of asking a few questions.”

“Do you think I actually care about what you people think? All of you are mere pawns in my game.” Tightening his grip, his golden eyes bore holes into the choking man. Not for long though, a second after, the deafening scream was replaced with the sounds of blood splattering on the walls. Turning around to face you, Overhaul wiped the blood off his hands onto his jacket. “Listen, I may have agreed to work with your lot, but there was no agreement regarding my actions and its consequences.”

“I’m well aware.” Lifting your chin up, you continued. “But this doesn’t revolve around you. You’re my pawn in this case. Remember, if you want out, go ahead. I can pull a few strings and solve this case without you.”

“Then so be it.”

- - - - -

a/n: oops. did yall like this chapter? this was pretty difficult to write since ive never really written this kind of scene (save for BLEACH because i may or may not have a Hitsugaya x Reader couchcough) but i hope yall like the increasing drama! :*

#overhaul x reader #overhaul #bnha overhaul #mha overhaul #chisaki #chisaki kai x reader #chisaki kai #bnha chisaki kai #mha chisaki kai

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