Don't you think it's funny cause actual canon gay characters in BL manga will say "I love you" but only the shounen bromance can spew out some of the most romantic shit akin to a 19th century poet writing a letter expressing his surpressed love for his lover 😭.....
Hahaha, I definitely think it's pretty hilarious that the "no-homo, we're just bros" stuff often does produce insanely over-the-top romantic nonsense fdlgkjdflgjd It's like so you're telling me that you totally like girls and everything just fine but your entire character arc and motivations and blah blah are completely centered around another boy??? Sure okay, yeah. 👀 Like why are you as a man--
No but I think it also definitely relates to how "straight male culture" IRL is so... homoerotic in many aspects, often because of the same reasons (i.e. they're obsessed with how other men perceive them, and women are just kind of seen as objects to obtain in order to please other men) ANYWAY I obviously don't want to go too deep into that or else I might start getting weird ppl crawling all over my blog HAHA!
Also there's something to be said for the fact that "we" as a queer audience are doing a LOT of heavy lifting in these cases. Often because it's a genuinely more interesting interpretation, or just more fun lmfao. I don't have a lot of faith in most shonen authors to do any of that shit intentionally, because, well, they're shonen authors. 😭
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yesterday, i learned that one of my acquaintances from church is like, gleefully and unreservedly supportive of the gazan genocide despite going to a church where every sermon for the past few weeks has been about the horrors and tragedy of said genocide. like, i could not fucking believe how hilarious he seemed to think it is that innocent palestinians are dying, just grinning and laughing and shaking his head and rolling his eyes when my pastor and i expressed horror at the innocent people being killed. just remembering it makes me choke up with anger.
anyway, i'm going to be very stupid and try to talk to him about it this coming sunday. i'll use all my teacherly tricks to try and gently lead him to feel one single scrap of empathy for the victims of israel's civilian massacre, but lbr: he'll probably respond with the same amount of glee and condescension as last night and it's going to end with me making me a scene at church.
but i know i shouldn't. so here are some things i should NOT say, no matter how angry he makes me:
i've always hated the sound of your voice, even before you said such horrible things. you say everything with such condescension. when you read the gospels in church, i have to hide my face behind my program to hide my grimacing. you make the words of christ himself sound like a grift of some oily used car dealer who thinks he's smarter than he actually is. i pity you for going through life with such a voice, and pity you even more for thinking it charming.
it baffles me that you'd allow something as basically human as compassion for the suffering of others to be so utterly sanded away by propaganda. it's pathetic that you could laugh at innocents dying. you've let yourself be lobotomized by a clumsy surgeon and style yourself wise with the icepick still sticking from your skull.
i've always thought your face looks like an easter island head sculpted from a raw chicken breast.
see? none of those would be productive, no matter how truly they express my feelings about this person.
thus: people of faith, pray that god grants me the wisdom and restraint to not light this motherfucker up in the middle of coffee hour. amen.
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there are so many things that stood out to me as i watched the dark age in full for the first time in a very long time. the standout is the fact that this is an episode that has something very clear to say about jenny -- insidious, quiet, not at all the larger point of the episode, but clear. and what it has to say is that she’s impermanent.
on some level, i was expecting some degree of narrative antipathy towards jenny as i continued to watch this show. i wasn’t expecting to see it this clearly and this early. i’ve talked before about how surprise and innocence both throw jenny under the bus in a way i find unfair, limiting, and lazy, but the dark age does it too! this is a consistent pattern with her! she’s presented as something that directly contradicts information we’re given later in canon: someone who cannot handle the reality of the man that giles is. the episode is structured to demonstrate jenny as someone who enjoys the unserious, flirtatious romance of her connection with giles, but who balks at the reality of being truly involved with him, and who flinches away from the man that he really is. it is done so in a way that is not halfhearted. it is incisively deliberate -- in the framing, in everything.
we begin with giles/jenny’s romance in bloom, emphasizing in particular that jenny is eager. she is forward. she is direct about wanting to sleep with him, and the way that she describes him is incredibly key to this as well: she refers to him as a sexy fuddy-duddy. her attraction to him is illustrated within the episode as something that stems from him being adorable and old-fashioned, and the episode itself demonstrates that while the adorable, old-fashioned librarian is a facet of him, it’s not all that there is. we’re given jenny’s and buffy’s reactions to this in tandem at the end of the episode -- jenny flinching away, buffy drawing closer. this is also incredibly important.
constantly, consistently, this episode juxtaposes jenny and buffy. they are placed next to each other in the computer lab, joined by their joint disbelief that cordelia would overlook such a key detail about giles. the conversation they share is one about giles, with buffy turning to jenny for guidance re: how to help giles and jenny -- this is important -- having NO IDEA. jenny and giles share an intimate scene in his apartment, as do giles and buffy -- yet the key factor is that the intimacy between giles and jenny, the moment of comfort, is entirely false. it is a manufactured illusion that a demon is utilizing against him. the intimacy between giles and buffy, in contrast, is something real -- an admission about his past that we never actually see him share with jenny. again, the end of the episode contains similar parallels. giles attempts to express his desire to remain in jenny’s life, and jenny, now fully informed about the kind of man he is, moves away from his touch. buffy seeks giles out and expresses her appreciation for him, entirely as he is, + how grateful she is to know him as a complete individual. how this makes her life easier.
i obviously did not enjoy this. i can’t pretend at objectivity as i write this up, and it’s still a constant war with myself as i try to figure out a way to write this in any way that isn’t just SOOOO obviously biased (don’t think that’ll work, though, lmao), because i personally don’t like the way that this episode just staunchly refuses the possibility that jenny could love giles as he is. this feels like an episode intended to be the kiss of death for giles and jenny’s relationship, and taken in and of itself, it’s actually a really convincing argument for them not being able to work. we’re shown the depths of buffy and giles’s relationship, but so much of it is about placing buffy and giles’s relationship right next to giles and jenny’s relationship in order to demonstrate how ill-suited jenny is for giles. she’s weak. she’s easily infected. she’s unable to cope with the reality of closeness with giles. she’s a liability to him and unsympathetic to his isolation. buffy, meanwhile, ADAPTS to the reality of closeness with giles, EVOLVES this episode to protect and support him, rescues HERSELF when someone attempts to make her a victim of eyghon. these are all things that the dark age illustrates with aplomb. we see giles sitting with buffy, spilling his guts -- we never see him that candid about his past with jenny, even as she herself will later be candid about her past with him.
and that’s the thing, too! this episode demonstrates such an INSANE double standard when it comes to the way giles handles secrets vs. the way jenny handles secrets. when point-blank asked to explain his deal re: a secret that is actively putting absolutely everyone in danger, giles refuses, snapping back with particularly vicious anger and telling buffy to “stay out of it.” he is determined to handle this shit on his own, and as ethan points out, this is not necessarily the best course when it comes to actually keeping people safe -- yet this episode presents him as a sympathetic figure. a flawed individual who deserves to be loved, understood, and accepted. multiple episodes later, jenny is THROWN AGAINST A DESK, and buffy’s furious demands for the truth are immediately met with complete, earnest honesty on jenny’s part, as well as complete and total cooperation with anything and everything that the scoobies demand of her & throw at her (think willow’s pointed brush-off, buffy’s dismissive cruelty, GILES COMING TO ASK HER FOR RESEARCH HELP AND TREATING HER LIKE SHIT IN THE SAME BREATH) -- yet she is presented as someone who has gotten her just desserts.
one could quibble about the magnitude of the secrets involved, but eyghon is presented as less of a threat in large part because the only person it ever actually threatens is jenny. much like angelus, the only person that the monster ever actually harms is jenny -- and both times, she is presented as responsible for it to some degree by virtue of wanting something from giles. it’s striking that jenny’s significant romantic overtures towards giles (wanting to sleep with him, telling him she’s in love with him) are always paired with some sort of harm inflicted upon her -- death, or something only narrowly escaping it. it’s striking that in this episode in particular, jenny’s desire to sleep with giles becomes something monstrous, utilized to try and tempt him -- and when he doesn’t succumb, she herself becomes something entirely unrecognizable. it’s key that giles never succumb to the temptation that is jenny. the individual that is jenny exists only hypothetically, and only in the margins.
this episode is insistent about presenting jenny as a road that will only lead to misery for giles. it works as foreshadowing for passion, certainly, but it’s also determined to highlight the fact that the problem lies within jenny herself. she isn’t able to handle the supernatural. she’s not as strong as she thinks. what she loves about giles isn’t real, and when faced with the reality of him, she flinches back. giles himself says it: “i don’t think she’ll ever really forgive me.”
thing is, though, SHE DOES. and only three episodes later! and THIS is where my little blorbo agenda shows up with baffling intensity, because this episode’s thesis statement about jenny JUST DOES NOT MAKE SENSE when looking at EVERYTHING WE ARE GIVEN ABOUT HER. she makes the decision to get back together with him, despite the clear implications in the dark age that all she enjoyed about him was the “sexy fuddy-duddy.” she is revealed to have intense ties to the supernatural, despite the clear implications in the dark age that this isn’t a life she can handle or wants to be a part of. the dark age is saying something about giles and jenny’s relationship that doesn’t match up with what canon says later, which is that she makes the CONSCIOUS CHOICE to come back to him, and that she has ALWAYS been a part of this world that she’s theoretically too terrified to continue living in with giles.
i feel that there are plenty of ways to emphasize the most important theme of this episode -- which is, of course, buffy coming to recognize giles as a flawed adult -- without also having to emphasize jenny’s inability to recognize giles as a flawed adult! she’s a plot device in this episode, a TOTAL nonentity: she’s something that can demonstrate that giles is complicated. she needs to be a shitty girlfriend so that we can understand that giles is HARD to understand. quite honestly, i’m starting to understand where some of the less savory takes on jenny are coming from, because this episode in particular leans into the idea of jenny Just Not Understanding Giles Enough. jenny Not Being Good Enough For Giles. fun fact: the first time i watched this episode with my mom, her take was to say, dismissively, “jenny can’t handle it.” i think that that’s an important anecdote to slot neatly in here. if taken totally at face value, and if one already might resent jenny for any reason (shippy or otherwise), this episode can easily and quietly feed into that resentment. jenny is shown Not Handling It.
yet, as ever, the messaging re: jenny is so inconsistent -- a by-product of her status as a Sexy Lamp, which is really in FULL SWING this episode -- that even this statement cannot remain true within the greater context of her largely hypothetical character arc. though she is demonstrated as someone who Doesn’t Understand Giles, someone who Can’t Handle Him, the show goes on to draw back the curtain and reveal that 1) she wants to be with him & 2) she actually has her own little Tragic Backstory that neatly matches his! the way she’s treated this episode -- the way the episode frames her as pulling away from giles explicitly BECAUSE she can’t handle what he’s done to her -- is not consistent with the notion of her returning to him, nor is it consistent with her backstory. it does not make sense.
(honorable mention to the foreshadowing of passion, which saturates the eyghon confrontation on a level that i truly didn’t realize until watching it now -- not just angel saving jenny, but how he saves her. how jenny-as-eyghon enters, and buffy steps in front of giles, but her furious attempt to block jenny is aborted and she’s thrown to the side. how jenny-as-eyghon is inches away from giles, from doing what she’s been “waiting to do for a long time,” before angel pulls her roughly away from him and wraps his hands around her neck. that is RIGHT THERE, people.)
(and btws this post is dedicated to @korinainspace + @alltheangstmygifttoyou bc y’all were very gracious about me going actually insane as we watched this and i greatly appreciate it. i hope you two are getting some excellent sleep. <3 )
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To add on your dancing/performing analysis list, I was wondering if you had any thoughts on yeonjun from txt. You previously spoke about txt as a whole a couple of times, and it made me think more about him, bc he's usually hailed as the best 4th gen dancer (which, kind of rude since Hwanwoong is right here, but also understandable, since the more an idol gets popular, the more their fans will swear that this idol's the best at doing X, and people who don't know any better will accept it at face value.) I find him satisfying to watch because his moves seem clean, but at the same time I don't find him interesting/entertaining and I can't pinpoint why? Maybe he's just another case of idol dancers who are good at mimicking choreography rather than embodying it? I'd like to have your opinion if you're not tired of talking about txt despite not being interested in them 😭😂
yeonjun doesn't really have a personality, that's why. technically he's very good, but he's not bringing much to the table other than 'boy', if you know what i mean. personally i do also think he's not super great at embodying choreo, but tbh the lack of personality in performance is a much bigger issue, and it's not just him that has this problem. most of the popular fourth gen male dancers are guilty of this; yeonjun, lee know, hyunjin, juyeon, even wooyoung and yunho have it to some extent as well. and i should point out that it's not just exclusive to kpop dancers - although it is significantly more prominent of an issue because of the focus on the face - but it happens amongst regular dancers too. it's pretty common for dancers to have very good technical skills but struggle to express emotion or character with their performances, and the best dancers are the ones that can do both. there's circumstances in dance where it's less of an issue, but in a performance form like kpop where the focus is so forward on the face and character of the idol, it's impossible to hide that lack. it's the reason why san, seonghwa, and hongjoong can put out much more captivating performances despite having worse technique, because they're playing to their specific strengths and they know exactly what you need in order to make a good performance in this specific form.
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