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vantaenims · 4 years

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daffodil street | seokjin

pairing: seokjin x reader

genre: friends to lovers, fluff, angst

word count: 8.1k

warning/s: mentions of death, age difference, unrequited love, and mutual pining.

summary: You’ve been struggling for quite some time to overcome your feelings for your best friend who doesn’t even love you the way that you do but there are instances when he would ignite your hopes or maybe this is all just in your mind but is too much to ask for something more?

Part of BTSGhostieBingo (unrequited love)

masterlist

Daffodil symbolizes regard and chivalry. It is indicative of rebirth, new beginnings, and eternal life.

Jin has told you the meaning behind this yellow flower countless times that you have memorized it by heart.

Why would he explain and tell this to you? Because Daffodil is the name of the street from where he lives and it also happens to be the street where you occasionally wander around with your bicycles during the late afternoons or evenings.

It’s something you’ve both done in the past when the both of you were still teenagers wherein you still have a lot of time to spare to do those kind of things but Jin managed to reopen the idea last week despite how hectic both of your schedules are - Jin being busy with graduate school and you with work.

You have happened to know Jin through your older brother. They have known each other ever since their grade school days but only got the chance to be closer in high school – a time in which Jin would frequently visit your house to play games after school until he stopped doing so when he turned eighteen.

You were in the living room, watching the television when Jin entered the house without your brother, telling you that your brother’s still in a meeting with his school club members and that he’s just going to wait for him here until he gets home.

But that never happened, your brother never came home.

Your brother was only eighteen when he was taken away in this world. He was on his way home, riding his bike when he had gotten into an accident as a truck van going over a hundred miles per hour in an intersection managed to beat a red light that ultimately caused the death of your brother.

Ever since that incident, you and Jin have become closer than ever considering you two are the only people that know your brother best, with him being his best friend and you being his younger sister. You two had become each other’s sense of comfort through all of the sorrowful and devastating times of your life.

[Sunday, Oct 6, 9:01 PM]

Jin: Where are you?

You: Home

You: Why?

Jin: Meet me in front of my house

Without much thought, you know for sure that he’s inviting you over to wander around his neighborhood. You got up from your bed as you grabbed your windbreaker from the back of your door, wearing it over your pajamas, not caring to dress up into something casual considering the time and the place.

“I’ll be going to Jin's,” you said to both of your parents as you peeked your head inside their bedroom.

“When did you not?” your mother lightly chuckled, “Don’t come home too late, you have work tomorrow”

“Yeah, I know” you said as you shook your head at your mother’s unwavering strictness with you.

Opening your storage room under the stairs, you got your bike out as you made your way outside of your house and on to your way to Jin’s house which is approximately five minutes away from you.

Soon as you know it, the subdivision gate then came into view as you turned right but then you instinctively stopped your bike as you skidded both of your slippers against the asphalt when you almost crashed yourself into the barrier gate that usually opens right away since the head security, Mister Choi, has grown to be familiar with you since he’s the one stationing the place over the years but it seems like a new security personnel replaced him.

“Location and I.D. Please” the man said who looked to be in his early thirties.

You panicked for a bit as you only brought your phone and a bit of cash with you, patting the pockets of your windbreaker for the hopes that you could’ve left your company I.D. there but you were met with none. Suddenly, the barrier gate was lifted and a familiar voice spoke out to you.

“The Kim’s at Daffodil Street, right?” Mister Choi asked you whilst he whispered to the young man how you frequent here hence the reason why he should not bother to ask for your identification.

“It’s okay, he’s just doing his job anyway and thank you, Mister Choi” you waved as you then entered the subdivision.

The security is pretty tight in here and by tight you mean that they have a protocol that should be strictly done - the guard house needs to contact the home owners every time someone wants to visit them to confirm if they’re expecting a visitor and once it’s confirmed, they could only then proceed inside.

The subdivision is considered as one of the exclusive homes for high profile individuals like celebrities, politicians, and such, hence the tight security. There’s no doubt that Jin’s family lives here since his dad is known to be the president of their multinational company which is something Jin would like to follow.

Jin’s currently taking his masterals in a graduate school that specializes in the business field, saying how he felt like it’s his responsibility to continue their company’s legacy someday since his older brother opted to go through the medical field instead which left him with no choice but to be the successor of their family business - not that he’s complaining as he told you because he in fact unexpectedly feels like he’s made for it.

As you entered, the first street post came into view, reciting them in a whisper as you passed by them.

Hyacinth Street.

Lilac Street.

Aster Street.

And finally, Daffodil Street.

It’s the fourth street to the right upon entering the gate. You chuckled to yourself upon thinking how Daffodil Street is the fourth street because you see, number four has become to be more meaningful for you or should you say that it has sounded foolish enough for you this year.

Four years is just the number of your age gap between you and Jin that seems to be pretty non-existent with how close you two are.

Four years is just the number of how it has been so long since you hid something from Jin, fearing that you might salvage your friendship with him if you planned to lay it out for him.

Four years is just the number since the time you fell in love with Jin.

Four years. It was also four years ago when you vaguely remember that night clearly, the night of your 19th birthday where you indirectly confessed your feelings to Jin and as a return, you got indirectly rejected too.

It was exactly 12 a.m. when Jin messaged you a birthday greeting and also telling you that he’s outside of your house. Jin has made it his mission to always be the first one to greet you, saying that you’ll have an amazing and great day ahead of you when the first greeting comes from the ‘most handsome man’ as what Jin refers to himself which is probably what you've grown to ignore by now.

Peeking out your window, you saw that he came along with his bike, instantly figuring out what you’re going to do but instead of the usual Daffodil Street, you biked around your neighborhood instead.

There’s something about the midnight hours that can make people emotionally vulnerable. You know how they say that a person tends to reveal the things they wouldn’t think they would say to another person during these hours and you’re the living proof to confirm it.

“I think i like...someone” you said, quickly replacing the word ‘you’ into ‘someone’ out of panic.

“Is it me?” Jin said, probably in a joking manner. Usually, you would just laugh at his statement but you’re pretty anxious right now and all you could do is to just stare at him, suddenly losing the will to answer the question.

“Don’t you think i’m too old for you?” Jin laughed as he ruffled a bit of your hair. You decided to laugh along but more so to laugh at yourself for thinking you’d have a chance to begin with perhaps for also the fact that you’ve been rejected indirectly.

“Kidding aside, who is it?”

“Nevermind, i think i really don’t like him that much”, you said as you look at Jin who’s completely oblivious to the pain you’re feeling inside.

Ever since that happened, you accepted that Jin would never see you in a different light thus the reason you tried your best to hinder the feelings you’ve harbored for him but it only did the exact opposite thing for you because it ironically grew even more over the years that you felt like you can’t escape from it now.

Soon enough, you took out your phone to call Jin to inform him that you’re already outside of their house but then he quickly dismissed the call, making you furrow your eyebrows until an obnoxiously loud sound startled you, causing you to drop your phone.

Looking to your right, you then see Jin in the driver seat of his pickup truck, doubling in laughter at your reaction and as if he wasn’t satisfied enough, he turned on the engine and the headlights, blinding you in the process as you got off your bike to pick up your phone off the ground and finally, glaring at him as you made your way towards his window.

“Sorry, you should’ve seen your face,” Jin said, calming himself once he saw your annoyed face, “Get in.”

“Weren’t we going to bike around?” you confusedly asked.

“Yeah, we are” Jin got out of his car to get your bike from you as he went to the back, opening his trunk to see that his bike was already loaded in there.

“Where are we going?” Jin smiled at that question but it just ticked you off at how he’s been clearly ignoring your questions as he picked up your bike to place it beside his, closing the trunk once he’s done, still no answer as he went straight away inside the car.

“You didn’t answer me” you said through his open window.

“Get in first” you rolled your eyes at him but nonetheless walked around the other side of the car, opening the door of the passenger side to get in but his pile of textbooks and a rim of photocopied papers occupied the space.

“Sorry, i just got home and had a meeting with my groupmates”, Jin told you as he emptied the front seat and placed all of it at the back seat along with his backpack.

“Can you now tell me where are we going?”

“Why don’t you put your seatbelt in first before i tell you?” Jin mischievously smiled that left you to huff in annoyance whilst you buckled yourself in.

Jin put the car into drive once you got yourself safely settled in your seat, the smile he’s been wearing still evident but it quickly broke into a chuckle when he noticed in his peripheral vision how you’re completely facing him and he just knows you’re completely annoyed by now.

“We’re going to Hangang Park.”

“At this hour? And it’s Monday tomorrow” Jin knew you would oppose his idea but he luckily made it work, thanks to your obedience.

“Wouldn’t it be nice to bike around a new scenery and not Daffodil Street?”

“But it’s late and you know that it’s Monday tomorrow”

“Just this once, please? Plus I'm your free pass, right?”

Technically, Jin is indeed your free pass - it’s more of like what you refer to him whenever you plan to stay out late at night back then. As you’ve mentioned, your parents are strict in a sense that they have imposed a curfew on you when you were still studying but that wouldn’t matter to them once you let them know that you’re with Jin or how he’s going to take you home - indicating how much they trust Jin.

Of course, you don’t have a curfew to follow anymore but that still wouldn’t stop your parents to question your whereabouts whenever it’s late but that’s fine with you, reminding yourself that they’re just concerned for you.

“Fine, it’s not like I have a choice anyway” you said as to cover the fact that you’re already into whatever idea Jin has to begin with just because you couldn’t say no to him.

“Don’t make it that way” Jin ruffled your hair, causing you to smile.

Biking around Hangang Park is something you’ve never done in your whole life despite living in Seoul for years until now. It has always been one of the things you’ve wanted to do but too lazy to do anything about it, setting it aside for some future time. It’s nice to bike around a new scenery as Jin said - skyscrapers and city lights in sight along with busking performances that made the place livelier at night.

Jin, who’s biking ahead of you, seems to be wearing a more casual attire with his plain white shirt and ripped denim pants, making you look underdressed compared to him as you’re only wearing a set of pink Hello Kitty pajamas, thinking you’re only going to bike around his neighborhood.

“You should’ve told me sooner that we’re going here so i could’ve dressed up” you complained, pedaling faster so that you’ll be cycling beside him.

Jin looked at you, chuckling once he took notice of your appearance, “It’s okay, you’re fine.”

“You’re saying that because you’re wearing normal clothes”

“You look cute in it, don’t worry”

You opted to look at the buildings to your right instead so that you could hide how that got you so flustered, making you purse your lips to stop your smile from getting bigger. Racking your mind, you’ve thought of things to talk about before the mood gets awkward until you’ve thought of one thing you’ve been curious about the happenings for the past week.

“Why are you being so spontaneous lately?”

You’re only able to reach out and hang out with each other through phone calls and messages or if luck is on your side, you’d get to hang out with him for at least once a month though that also rarely happens but you’re thankful your closeness still remains the same.

Also, you never failed to notice how Jin would message you every single night, inviting you to bike around which is something you’ve both done in the past but failed to continue considering your busy lives now until everything took a turn during the last week and suddenly, you’ve been spending most of your time together whether it be through meetups or through phone calls and messages.

“I just have a lot in my mind right now and you see those textbooks right?”

“If i remember correctly, isn’t your reporting due this week?”

“Yeah but I’ll be burned out if i don’t take a break right now.”

Graduate School is surely taking a toll on Jin specially with the way he always complains to you about how he’s hardly getting any rest or sleep from how his schedule is always filled with day to day lectures, reports, and presentations and at the same time, he would occasionally drop by his dad’s company to help him and learn the know hows.

Jin has told you how it has taken all of the free time he has and there was no doubt that he is exaggerating any of it. You could only sympathize and show support to Jin who is clearly only doing the best that he can to live up the expectations they’ve set on him as the sole successor of their business.

“How’s grad school for you?”

“Hell as always but i’m just glad i’d get to leave that hell hole soon”

“Oh so you’re claiming it huh?”

“Wow, are you underestimating me?” Jin dramatically clutched his hand above his chest, making you roll your eyes and laugh.

“Of course not, Mister COO” you teased as what you’ve always called him, telling him that if his dad is the CEO then that makes him the COO - Child Of the Owner, “I now already know what to get for your graduation gift.”

“What?” Jin asked, raising his eyebrows at you.

“A name plaque that you can place in your office - Kim Seokjin, Child Of the Owner”

“Funny” Jin said in a sarcastic manner.

“Oh come on, your jokes are far worse than mine” you playfully slammed your hand against his back when you biked past him.

“You just have a bad sense of humor” Jin snickered at you.

It was particularly refreshing to stroll around Hangang Park at night until it had to be ruined when you have to maneuver around the couple who’s engrossed in kissing each other in the middle of the bike lane out of all places. If you come to look at it, there are a lot of couples surrounding the area as if it isn’t enough to make you feel more single and lonely.

“How is Nami, by the way?”

Nami is one of the kindest persons you’ve met in your life, she’s so kind that it’ll be impossible to grow some kind of hatred towards her, specially if she’s the one who’s making Jin happy for four years now and you can’t help but sometimes be jealous of her.

They’ve been together for so long that the idea of them ending up marrying together isn’t a far fetch idea at all. Nami and Jin are what you’d like to call the perfect pair, seeing how their relationship looks to be healthy and ideal for a couple. They’ve genuinely both brought out the best in each other that’s why you couldn’t really find a reason not to hate Nami because she deserves him - they both deserved each other.

You’re not even faking it when you think of it that way because you’ve come to accept it a long time ago that you and Jin can only be friends ever since his rejection but it can’t always be helped that there are times you still think of the possibility between you two though rarely but the hope is still there.

“She’s okay”, Jin answered.

“Just okay?” you scoffed at his prompt response.

“Yeah” Jin raised his eyebrows at you, not knowing what you would want him to say, “Anyway, how about you? I keep forgetting to ask how you are every time we meet.”

You stare at Jin’s side profile, thinking if he just dodged his way out of talking about Nami but you shrugged nonetheless as you pressed on the brakes.

“I’m tired.” you exclaimed as you stood up, bottoms hurting from sitting too much on the saddle.

“Why? What’s wrong?”

“No, I'm literally tired. Can we take a break on that bench first?” you chuckled as you pointed to the bench that’s facing the river as you made your way over it.

Hopping off your bike, you put down the kickstand as you set it aside the bench where you plopped off as you let your head lull backwards on the edge of the backseat, giving you a perfect view of the night sky and the 63 Building on your right side catching your attention.

Beside you, you then see a group of kids playing with their light up toys as they run along the grass. The view gave you a sense of nostalgia when you and your brother used to beg for your parents to buy you one whenever you would go to a park as you would always get jealous of the other kids who also had them.

“Do you want some water?” Jin suddenly asked, standing up to go to the convenience store nearby when you nodded at him.

“Can you also buy some ramen? I heard that they taste way better here” you shouted as Jin raised his thumb at you. You turned back to watch the kids having fun when you felt the buzz on your phone.

[Sunday, Oct 6, 10:39 PM]

Moyeon: What’s your passport number?

Moyeon: There’s an ongoing seat sale, so hurry!!

You: Wait, I’m outside!

You: I’ll send it to you later

During your college years, you’ve been planning with Moyeon to take an out of country vacation once you two have graduated hence the text message.

Moyeon: Let me guess

Moyeon: YOU’RE WITH JIN AGAIN!

You: :(

Moyeon is your best friend and the only one who knows your secret feelings for Jin which is something she had countlessly given you advice with - to snap out of your one sided feelings in to which you would always say that you will but there are things that are easier said than done and this situation is one of those.

In the span of those four years, you’ve tried your best to totally eradicate the unnecessary feelings you have for Jin though your efforts are always wasted at the end because you fail every single time you try as you find yourself back at square one.

Suddenly, your phone vibrated along with the sound of your ringtone, the name of Moyeon with a pig emoji flashed on your screen.

“Hello, Stupid”

“Hi Moyeon” you sighed, knowing you’re in for another sermon.

“Is he with you right now?”

“No, he’s buying something at the convenience store” you said, adjusting yourself on the seat as you twisted your upper body around to place your arm on the backseat whilst you propped your chin above your arm as you stared at the convenience store so you could watch when he’ll go out.

Moyeon’s curiosity perked once she heard the mention of the convenience store and she was rather surprised to know that you’re in Hangang Park tonight, asking you if you two are on a date with you saying that you could only dream about it for that to happen.

“What happened to ‘I’m not going to give in to his hang outs’” Moyeon said in a slightly high pitched voice, causing you to smile and shake your head even though you know you’ve said that - a lot of times in fact, differing from things like ‘I won’t talk to him that much anymore’ or ‘I’ll start to ignore him’ or other things that didn’t seem to happen in the first place and you know that you’ve said it too much that Moyeon could make a screenshot compilation out of it with your replies.

You always give in easily as soon as Jin would message you as if you’ve instantly forgotten that you’re supposed to do the exact opposite thing but how can you not when he has always been irresistible for you.

“I’m just all talk, I know” you said, “My feelings for him will eventually fade soon.”

“And until when are you going to say that?”

Moyeon has her way to always keep you in touch with reality although you know for yourself where you stand in Jin’s life but you’re also not lying that there’s a tiny glimpse of hope within you that maybe or someday, he’ll be able to look at you in a different light but that’s just wishful thinking.

“Soon” you chuckled as you lifted your eyes from the ground only to see that Jin has made his way out of the convenience store and is now walking back towards you, “Okay, he’s coming back, bye!”

You heard Moyeon click his tongue in disapproval as she said one last thing before hanging up the call, “Well, don’t forget to send me your passport number.”

Placing back your phone into your pocket, you smiled at Jin as if you weren’t just talking about him earlier.

“Who’s that?” Jin asked as he handed you the square tin foil packaging filled with ramen and a boiled egg plus a sausage on stick - your favorite.

“Just Moyeon”, you said as you broke the chopsticks, “How much is this?”

“It’s fine,” Jin said as he slurped on his noodles right away.

“Aw thank you, Jin” you said in a rather cheery voice as you winked and elbowed him at his side, causing the soup of his ramen to splatter a bit onto his jeans that made him close his eyes in an annoyed manner only to open them to give you a glare albeit playfully though he rather looked cute than menacing but you didn’t say as to not inflate his ego but more so to not give away your hidden admiration.

“Oh no, we can’t have a stain on your jeans” you took one of the tissues as you wiped it on the stain as if it’ll make a difference.

“Quit buttering me up”, Jin said as he swatted your hand away, making you chuckle as you focused your attention back on eating your ramen and soon enough, silence filled in between you two as you’re both too busy munching on your food as if you haven’t eaten dinner yet.

“I’m getting cold, can we share?” Jin said through his chattering teeth as he tugged on the sleeve of your windbreaker.

“How can we share? You know i’m always cold” you stated out though you quite feel bad for Jin who’s only wearing a short sleeve shirt whilst you on the other hand is double coated with your long sleeved top and a windbreaker.

Jin instructed you to remove your right arm from the sleeve to give that part of the windbreaker for him whilst you occupy the left sleeve with your left arm thus leaving Jin with no choice but to scoot closer to you and you can’t help but think how his shoulders are touching yours or how the sleeves of the windbreaker is too short for him as it only falls on his wrist compared to yours that’s covering half of your hand.

Butterflies make their way to your stomach and you try so hard to play it out like this is nothing to you as you focused on biting on your sausage. Until you felt a buzz coming off from his jean pocket, spotting it to be from Jin’s phone that he took out and you were quick enough to see that it’s a call from Nami before Jin flipped his phone over so as not to show the screen and also pressing the side button to stop it from vibrating.

“Aren’t you going to answer that?” you asked, furrowing your eyebrows at why he just ignored Nami’s call.

“I’ll call her later”

Jin’s not so good at being discreet if you could say that because you could definitely tell that something’s up between him and Nami ever since that prompt reply of his, figuring that maybe they just had a big fight and you can’t help but ask just because you’re genuinely concerned if they’re alright.

“Are you two okay?” you asked as you glanced at Jin to see him focused on chewing his food as he took out the water bottle from the plastic bag to take a sip as if he’s trying to avoid your question and you were only certain that you had put him in an awkward place once you noticed his eyes blinking excessively which is an obvious sign for when he feels anxious.

You look straight ahead as you bite from your sausage and eventually humming along to the song that’s probably being performed by a busker somewhere in the distance to make up for the uncomfortable situation.

It wasn’t your intention to make Jin awkward but you could sometimes be quite dumb for not reading the air and you had just realized that Nami is probably a sensitive topic for him right now hence the reason why you didn’t pry any further even though you know everything about each other, there’ll always be some kind of boundary that you both shouldn’t stick your nose into.

“We broke up”

Upon hearing that statement, you stopped yourself from chewing only to swiftly turn your head to the side with wide eyes as you look at Jin who has his head hanging low as he stared down on his shoes.

“What!? How did - why?” you asked in a mess as you try to find the right words to say but you’re too preoccupied in processing this new information.

So this must be the reason why he was always persistent to change the topic lately whenever Nami is brought up in the conversation and it’s because they’re no longer together anymore which is something you’re quite not sure if you should feel sad or happy about it but one thing you know is that you’re going to set aside your feelings first and be a friend to Jin, specially now.

“What do you want me to answer first?” Jin chuckled for a moment until he got serious again to continue explaining, “We broke up two weeks ago.”

“Why?”

Jin placed his elbows above his legs as he intertwined his hands, fidgeting with his thumb as if he’s hesitant to answer the question but he told you the reason nonetheless, “I don’t know… I feel unfair for not loving her the same way anymore.”

“What do you mean? Like you fell out of love?”

“Yeah” Jin confirmed.

“Did you tell her that?” Jin nodded his head, leaving you to wonder how Nami’s doing right now and how she is able to cope about this, much so because of the reason.

You don’t know much about relationships but one thing you know is that breaking up because the other fell out of love is one of the painful reasons to take in just because it’s something out of your control or sometimes it’s beyond repair.

“Well, did you at least try to make it work again?”

“I did, in fact, this was the second time we’ve broken up. We were on the rocks since June - we’ve tried our best to fix it but i don’t know… it seems like it won’t really work anymore when i feel like this.”

You heaved out a sigh, feeling quite frustrated because he sounds very much of an asshole right now though it’s not like you could blame him when he tried to make it work but still you can’t just give up in a relationship just because he doesn’t feel anything - Love is not a feeling, it is a commitment.

You could only guess that Nami called a while ago to talk things through and persuade Jin to reconsider their relationship which you think is something Jin has finally given up on, considering how he didn’t answer the call.

“Why don’t you try again? You know, maybe a third try’s the charm.”

You know your place and you’re just being selfless so the least thing you could do right now is for Jin to be happy and you believe that Nami is the perfect person for that and he’s just out of his mind to let her go like this.

Jin only fidgeted with his thumb until he relaxly laid his back on the backseat, looking at you for the first time ever since he broke out the news that had you feeling nervous because of the close proximity but more so because of the way he’s looking at you so softly yet so intense at the same time.

“You think so?” Jin asked whilst he continued to hold you with his stare and you don’t know if you’re just imagining things but why does it look like he’s more of like asking it out of a permission but maybe that’s just what your head wants you to think and before you could even get more delusional, you break the contact as you stare straight ahead.

“Yeah, I think so”, you said as you soon started to chatter your teeth from the cold.

Jin took note of this as he scooted much closer, grabbing the side of your face with his left hand as he guided it to rest on his shoulder, hands still on the side of your face and you could only hope he wouldn’t feel how your face is heating up right now.

“Here, so you’d be warm”

“Thanks” you whispered, not even moving an inch with how the sudden action got you stunned but you know that once you move your head to look up, his face will be perfectly mere inches near you which is something you never imagined that you’ll be able to get this close to him like this.

And you took advantage of the moment to cherish it, you never know when this will ever happen again but you’ll take it if it’s the closest thing he can hold you like the way you wanted him to.

You’ve wanted to put your arms around him but you’re scared, always been scared how he will react so you just let your arm limply lay on your leg and when you were about to do it, you back away at the last minute as you slip out your arm off of the windbreaker instead.

“I’ll throw this out” you said, gathering the trash beside you as you put them in a plastic bag.

Standing up, you excused yourself with the plastic bag on your hand as you walk away in a brisk manner so you could escape for a while from the source that’s making your little hopes grow bigger day by day and it’s quite alarming you to even hope for something more when you have ingrained in your mind that it’ll be impossible to happen.

But how can you stop yourself when Jin is being more in touch with you these days and you mean it literally and figuratively. Your best at acting as if his actions do not affect you but you noticed how he’s being more affectionate than ever like how he’s placing a piece of your hair behind your ear or those subtle touches or how he’s been hanging out with you everyday all of a sudden or how he’s been constantly calling you during the late night hours just because he likes to talk to you more is what he told you even though you just met a few hours ago.

At the beginning, you thought that all of these changes seemed too good to be true and you could now confirm that your intuition is right. The reason why Jin is acting like this is because he just got himself out of a long-term relationship and that leaves him to feel vulnerable and lonely.

He just needs someone to be there for him and that someone is you because like you said - you’re each other’s sense of comfort and that’s enough for you to keep yourself in touch with reality and for your hopes to deflate.

All he needs right now is a friend, someone he could share his worries to. No more, no less.

Sighing, you disposed of the plastic bag as you crossed your arms to keep yourself warm but youre nose eventually started to feel runny that had you sniffing from the cold as you walked yourself back to the bench.

“I think we should go home now” you said as you look over at your mom’s message, saying that it’s already midnight.

“Your nose is red” Jin chuckled as he removed his arm from your windbreaker, standing up to give it to you but he beat you to it when you were about to grab it as he placed it around your shoulders that got you quite stunned for a moment until he spoke up, “Come on, get your arms in.”

This gesture made you feel weak again with how he’s being so caring but you did not show any of it as you try to play it cool.

“It’s okay, i got it” you said as you grab the windbreaker from his but Jin did nothing to move himself away, still standing in front of you as he held the piece of clothing around you and that only leaves you to abide if it’s the only way he could finally stop being this close to you because you’re sure that your heart has been a fluttering mess and you can’t keep up.

“Let’s go,” Jin said with a smile as he hopped on his bike, making you do the same as well. You let him advance for a bit until the distance is safe for you to whisper the whims of your heart.

You’re making it so hard to loose the strings when you tug it ever so tightly.

Thankfully, it has gotten much warmer now that you’re inside Jin’s car but that still doesn’t stop your series of sneezes and you’ve now definitely caught a cold and a case of runny nose which only made Jin feel bad for asking you to share your windbreaker with him awhile ago.

“Here have some more” Jin laughed with a lace of worry as he opened his center console to get his pack of tissues to give it to you, “Let’s stop by a pharmacy or a convenience store for a medicine.”

You nodded your head as you blew your nose onto the tissue, resting your head back against the window as you closed your eyes to relieve the headache but you’re glad your sneezing fit stopped for a while.

“Hey, you didn’t answer my question back there” Jin reminded you.

“What question?” you asked with your eyes still closed.

“I asked you how you’ve been doing?”

“Well, I’m okay except for now”,you pointed to your nose that had you both laughing, “No, but seriously, I’m doing just fine.”

Jin snorted, “Such a generic answer.”

“I think I've practically told you everything”, well you think you did with the amount of hours you’ve been talking and spending time with each other since the past week.

“Everything?”

Of course not.

You managed to ignore his question as you bite on your thumb, putting your attention to the scenery out of the window but your attention was soon diverted into something else when you felt something warm on top of your hand and to your surprise, it was because Jin placed his hand on top of yours as he tightly held it in his.

“You know, I've been meaning to thank you for being there with me, specially these days.”

You turned your hand upwards so that you could properly clasped it around his, squeezing it as you warmly smile at him, “Of course, that’s what friends do.”

Those words sounded bitter as it left your mouth but you need to remind yourself to keep yourself grounded, that being friends is as far as what you both can come to which is why you pulled back your hand from his, laying it to rest around your stomach as you turned back to look outside the window.

“Of course” Jin meekly said as he cleared his throat.

The air definitely felt awkward but not for long as Jin parked the car in front of the convenience store by a gasoline station. You opened the door to escape the suffocating silence and walked straight inside the store to get a bottle of water and a pack of decongestants by the counter.

“Drink it with some Vitamin C” Jin said as he appeared right beside you to stand with you in line, giving you a box of orange juice.

“Thanks, anything else you’d like to buy?” Jin shook his head no but changed his mind instantly when he saw the pack of gummies nearby. He was about to reach for it when he stopped midway to take out his phone from his pocket and you were able to get a glimpse that it’s a call coming from Nami again.

“I’ll wait for you outside” you nodded your head as you placed the items on the counter, getting the pack of gummies for Jin as you take a look right by the convex mirror to see him taking the call.

As you got the paper bag in your hand, you pulled the doors as you walk out of the store and you didn’t mean to eavesdrop on their conversation but you were able to make out the words ‘try again’ and ‘i love you’ for you to decipher that Jin took your advice and as ironic as it sounds, you can’t help but feel a twinge of pain.

In an instant, your ever rapid growing feeling of hope quickly deflated until it diminished and you think that this should be a sign that you seriously need to acknowledge for you to stop and move on.

You stood idly outside of the door of his car as you waited for the doors to be unlocked but Jin’s too engrossed in the conversation for him to notice that you have already made your way outside and you could hear your heart slowly crumbling as you heard more of their conversation.

“Sorry, i didn’t knew you came out already” Jin said as he pressed on his keys

“It’s okay”, you said, opening the door but you hesitated for a bit as you watched Jin get in, buckling himself in, “I’ll go to the restroom first.”

You leave the paper bag onto your seat when Jin nodded at you, closing the door as you walk towards the direction of the bathroom, pursing your lips as you try to keep your emotions in bay.

As you opened the door of the restroom, you got inside a cubicle, locking it as you just stood there to stare at the back of the door as you felt all the emotions crashing all at once, making you squeeze your eyes shut as you dug the heels of your palm into your eyes.

You cannot cry just yet.

It’s making you frustrated how you’ve been trying so long for your feelings to let go only for it to resurface again and again and it hurts how this is the most painful slap of reality to you just when you thought that maybe, just maybe your hopes could be realized only for it to come crashing back down as always.

Overwhelmed with emotions, you let out a whimper as you let yourself cry a tear or two for only a moment as you still try to hold it in but your heart is broken and you’re done mending it every time by yourself but you’re also quite stupid for letting him have the power to break it.

Unlocking the door, you were immediately greeted with your reflection as you look back on yourself at how pathetic you are as you turn on the faucet to splash your face with some cold water.

You wiped your face with some tissue paper whilst still looking back at yourself, sliding your finger under the rim of your eyes to remove the evidence that you’ve just cried. You took a deep breath and checked to see if you look normal enough to go back inside the car.

You get yourself settled in right away as soon as you get in and thankfully, Jin didn’t notice anything different when he casually asked you if you’re good to go in to which you nodded your head. You take out the items out of the bag as you pop in the tablet of decongestant, downing them in an instant with the bottled water.

It was nice and quiet for a while as you sip on your orange juice as you let the side of your head rest against the window. You noticed on the reflection of the window how Jin would turn his head at you to take a glimpse right then and there, unsure what he’s been trying to do but before you could think of it too much, you felt your eyelids starting to get droopy from the drowsiness that probably is the effect from the medicine.

Next thing you know, you were woken up as you felt the car jolt only to realize that Jin ran through a speed bump without slowing down.

“Sorry” Jin apologized when he saw you rubbed your eyes from sleep.

“Weren’t you going to drop me off first?” you asked as you noticed the surroundings that look like to be the inside of Jin’s subdivision.

“Yeah but i forgot that i was supposed to give you the kimchi my mom made” Jin said as he parked the car in front of their house, “Do you want to go inside for a while?”

“I’ll just wait here” you yawned, stretching your arms.

“Okay, I'll be quick” Jin smiled, ruffling your hair as he got off and closed the door whilst you watched him walk through their front walkway until he halted as if someone called him when he turned to look at his right with a quite surprised look.

Curious as well, you looked back to see that it was Nami who had just gotten out of her car as she rushed forward to envelope Jin in a soul crushing hug. It took almost a while for Jin to return the gesture, not expecting her presence tonight hence the reason why he looked over at you to give you an apologetic look.

You watch as Jin said something to Nami that had her looking over your direction. Jin left Nami to stand there for a while as he went to your side, opening the door to tell you something.

“Hey, maybe you should go inside for a while. I just need to talk to Nami and then i’ll take you home.”

“No, it’s okay. I could bike my way home” you said, feeling like you shouldn’t be here at all to witness this but it looks like Jin’s opposed to your suggestion as he blocked you before you could even step a foot outside the car.

“It’s late, I’ll drive you home, okay?” there’s no way Jin would let you win thus you obliged.

“Fine but can i just stay in here?”

Jin nodded with a worrisome look, “Sorry, i didn’t know she would come over.”

“It’s fine, really.”

“I promise it’ll be just quick” you pushed Jin away playfully as you told him not to worry and go back to Nami who then offered you a warm smile once both of your eyes met.

As soon as Jin closed the doors, you watched as he ran up towards her, the forced smile you were showing now completely turned into a frown, making you look away as you try to look everywhere else except them so that you could keep your mess of emotions at bay.

Hold it in just a few more.

Heaving out a sigh, you took the last ounce of courage in you to look at them and concluded that maybe this is how it will always be and that some things just don’t go the way you would want them to - you can never be in the picture.

It has been four years but it isn’t too late for you to finally let him go.

As much as it hurts to think about it, this will be the last time that you’re letting yourself be with Jin and you truly mean it this time. It might be hard at first but you need to keep a distance in order to give yourself time to heal and you could hope he’d understand why you have to do this.

Loving someone who could never love you has always been dangerous in the first place as you find yourself in a never ending loop of anguish suffering and you could only truly let go when you take the courage and will to do it.

Letting go of someone doesn’t always end up with you losing them but just maybe you need to let go in order for you to handle yourself better and to be able to take a better hold of your own worth so you could stop holding on to something that’s not even meant for you to hold on to.

As you were able to wrap your head upon this realization, your eyes flickered towards the car’s side mirror where it perfectly showed you the street post that reads the name Daffodil Street that had you chuckling as you remembered it’s meaning once again but more so because of its other meaning you’ve come to learn recently that perfectly explains your predicament.

Daffodil symbolizes regard and chivalry. It is indicative of rebirth, new beginnings, and eternal life.

Jin has told you the meaning behind this yellow flower countless times that you have memorized it by heart.

It’s such a funny thing how Daffodils look so bright with it’s yellow petals yet so dark with its other underlying meaning. Maybe Jin is unaware of the other meaning or he may have forgotten to say it to you but that doesn’t matter anyway as he made you feel it instead.

Daffodil also symbolizes unrequited love.

A/N: This work is inspired by the songs called fallingforyou by The 1975 and Someone That Loves you by Honne (ft. Izzy Bizu) which perfectly gives out unrequited love or mutual pining vibes. Hope you’ll like this!

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skullsandwineglasses · 3 years

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Arsenal Military Academy (First Impressions - Eps 1-13)

I’m about a quarter of the way through, but I’m really enjoying it so far. The premise is simple: a 19-year old young woman disguises herself as her deceased brother and enrolls in the military academy. Like most dramas that take place during the pre-modern republican era, the main conflict and antagonist is usually about the threat of Japanese occupation.

But this drama is more light-hearted than serious. The Japanese plot line looms in the background, but the main focus (so far) is about the FL’s training at the academy and the missions that the students go on and their interactions with each other. There are some really good comedic moments, and the drama has good pacing.

The Female Lead - Xie Xiang (played by Bai Lu)

I’m going to be making comparisons to The Legends because the reason why I started this drama was to see Bai Lu and Xu Kai again. I know these two dramas are completely difference so it’s not fair to compare them, but I’m going to be talking about these differences.

Xie Xiang is a watchable FL, but I think she’s missing that spark that would make her a memorable FL. She’s not as physically capable as her male counterparts, but she has the perseverance, wits, and martial arts skills that many of her peers lack. It’s a really standard character profile for a cross-dressing FL in a military academy, and tbh, it’s kind of boring. I’m not sure what would help elevate her character more, but it just feels like something’s missing.

In comparison, the second FL has that spark. She’s more layered. She comes from a middle-class, well-to-do family, but chooses to be an entertainer. She’s arrogant, demanding, high maintenance, but she’s also protective of her friends and doesn’t hesitate to stand up to things she thinks is wrong. She’s a haughty firecracker, but what makes her admirable is how she isn’t afraid to be herself. I think it’s an interesting balance for a character to be obnoxiously full of themselves, but to also care about others. She’s probably the first SFL that I actually enjoy watching (even if she might be a potential love rival to the FL).

The Male Lead - Gu Yanzhen (played by Xu Kai)

Speaking of someone who is obnoxiously full of themselves but still has the capacity to care for others, the ML is exactly this. In this drama, Xu Kai plays a character who is nearly the opposite of the character he played in The Legends. Here, Gu Yanzhen is a cheeky, mischievous, spoiled rich kid who loves flirting with women and causing trouble. He’s like an overgrown child (like when he’s jealous and purposely gets himself sick so that Xie Xiang would take care of him), but when he wants to do, he’s also able to show high levels of competence, maturity, and bravery.

Xu Kai really stands out in this drama. He’s quite charming and adorable because he’s allowed to be more expressive. He mopes, teases, complains, smirks, worries, and yearns. Despite playing a noble, self-sacrificing, and devoted ML in The Legends, Xu Kai didn’t completely win me over then. Mostly because his character was a bit flat and so overdone in the xianxia genre. But seeing a different side of his acting in AMA has made him grow on me.

It’s almost as if Xu Kai and Bai Lu switched personalities in this drama where he’s more outgoing, while she’s more reserved. He’s now the loud and impulsive one, while she’s the more conscientious one who wants to do something meaningful.

The Chemistry

So far it’s been very one-sided. Gu Yanzhen figures out that she’s a girl early on and falls for her, while she still finds him intolerably annoying and is instead crushing on the second male lead. Because she doesn’t want to have anything to do with him, the chemistry is kind of lacking. If I hadn’t watched The Legends beforehand, I’m not sure if I would be onboard with this ship.

The story is currently purposely set up so that we see that the ML and SFL are more compatible, and the FL and SFL are more compatible. Gu Yanzhen and the SFL are practically the same person, and they have a lot of playful bantering, so it’s kind of hard not to ship them. But I’m curious to see when the switch happens. We see that Xie Xiang is starting to slightly warm up to Gu Yanzhen, but Gu Yanzhen needs to mature a bit more before she changes her opinion of him.

I’m also living for these stories where he figures out her true identity before everyone else and tries to help her protect her secret, but she’s completely clueless to it. The same things happened in The Legends, and the dynamic repeats itself here.

The second ML is portrayed as being a perfect character. Mature, clever, kind, caring, righteous. It’s hard not to like him. I’m wondering if he already knows that Xie Xiang is a girl because of his glances, or if that’s because the director was purposely trying to make it ambiguous. At least at this point, he seems to be the best match for the FL, even though he currently likes his former classmate, who is actually working for the Japanese.

The Plot

I like how there are a lot of intersecting characters, which helps expands the fictional world. The peripheral characters all somehow relate back to the main leads, so you can’t really skip their scenes because their stories connect somehow.

The colour-grading, costuming, sets, and OST also help immerse you into the era.

Despite being have a simple and stereotypical premise, it’s not easy to predict the endgame of the drama. You know that at some point, Xie Xiang’s identity will be revealed, but then what? After that point, the plot is going to take a turn because it’ll need a new conflict, which will be probably related to the Japanese, but you’re not sure what yet. The drama feels refreshing so far, but I also haven’t watched too many republican era dramas, so it’s not hard to impress me.

Other anachronistic observations

In episode 1, when Xie Xiang uses the women’s restroom while dressed as a man and runs into the second FL (Qu Manting), Manting accuses her of trying to take pictures of her and demands that Xie Xiang take out her camera and delete/destroy the photos. It’s a minor point, but cameras in those days were huge and thus hard to hide, so it should have been obvious that Xie Xiang didn’t have a camera on her.

In a later episode, Xie Xiang struggles to complete the obstacle course because she’s unwell, and while it’s not explicitly stated, I think we’re supposed to assume that it’s because of period cramps, and I applaud the drama for implying this (but it would have been even better if they made the implication more explicit). But ever since the drama started, I wondered about this. Even if someone didn’t have period cramps, how would you hide menstruation while living in the same room with someone? TMI, but when I was living with 4 other girls during uni, the garbage can in our bathroom would be filled with sanitary products during the same week every month. Women back then didn’t have the same sanitary products as we do now, but they still had to scrub and change cloths, like my mom did when she was younger. So realistically, Xie Xiang would have had to spend long periods of time (no pun intended) in the washroom to scrub her cloths. And after she did so, where did she dry them?

Anyway, those are minor points. Overall, this drama is a fun watch, and I’m thankful that Xu Kai and Bai Lu got to collaborate again before the fandoms made things awkward as they do with any rumoured CP (*cough cough* Deng Lun and Yang Zi, and Cheng Yi and Yuan Bingyan). It’s as though the more chemistry two people have together in a drama, the less likely they’ll collaborate again because the fandoms will start to hate each other due to some misunderstanding and/or company management. The irony. So I guess the goal is to have low, platonic chemistry so that you don’t become enemies so as to leave the door open for future collaboration opportunities. Sorry, so that was bitter and a bit off tangent. I just have a lot of thoughts about the toxicity of fandom culture.

#arsenal military academy #烈火军校 #xu kai #bai lu #cdrama #白鹿 #许凯 #cdrama review #cdrama impressions #the legends

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queernuck · 5 years

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I am almost sorry, but you are likely to be around drug users at Pride if you spend a significant amount of time at various festivities, vigils, and events, even if you attend the most sexless, supposed-safe, sanitized ideations of whatever events are associated with pride. This is effectively a matter of how common drug use is, how many different sorts of drug use there are, and how ubiquitous drug use is within both gay communities and various communities that are in assembly and assemblage with it in one way or another.

What has frustrated me most, recently, in looking at how others view drug use, drinking, and sobriety in relation to Pride is that the understanding of our community’s ties to substance abuse are so poor, so awful, so normative.

So many reinscriptions and repetitions of “advice” or directives given to us about how we must behave at Pride are ones that repeat largely hegemonic advice, advice that looks at public spaces in a way that fundamentally focuses on individual actions rather than structural inadequacies. Admonishments about smoking in public ignore larger issues of air quality, the structuring of capitalist work ethic such that one of the few ways to reliably get breaks on a reasonable schedule is get addicted to nicotine. Alcohol is among the few intoxicants that can be legally consumed in public openly, with marijuana in a kind of grey area in many places and illegal but tolerated, at least to a degree. Cocaine, as a substance that can be insufflated and one that goes well with alcohol, provides stimulation and confidence in a world where you are asked to keep drinking to stay at a bar, and a bar is likely one of the few social spaces you have, so that cocaine becomes a means of making the experience of going to the bar something memorable (in a literal sense, by keeping one from blacking out) as well as providing the energy necessary for going from a bar to an apartment, to a bedroom, to an encounter of a sexual character. The same is even more true of methamphetamine, or Tina, common in many gay communities and a favorite of many gay men, including in circles that by their nature are constructed around drug use.

Drugs and sex go together frequently, even with light usage of entirely acceptable drugs. Alcohol, either consumed or as an accessory to distract those who are satisfied with intoxication at a given moment, is present at most events where the audience is of legal age and the context is casual, or is well suited for such casual encounters. And, as discussed before, the use of cocaine surrounding sex is relatively well-documented as well, both inside and outside of gay communities. The use of poppers, a term for amyl nitrates, in sex is not uncommon, and certainly no longer restricted to gay communities. however, that it got its start, became popular in, gay circles is hardly disputed, mainly because even the amusingly droll wikipedia account of the history of the drug mentions the way in which it was taken on by a kind of avant-garde of straight culture (really, likely, just ones who had fucked a bisexual person and thought themselves subversive for it despite being far straighter than the highway line you walk down when checking if youre gonna catch your third DUI) as the muscle-relaxing effects of poppers are known both for increasing sexual pleasure, and for relaxing muscles in a fashion that allows for a greater ease of sexual acts. Or, if one is speaking without euphemism, after some drinks, some coke and some poppers an average vers or bottom is ready to bust themselves wide open.

These are examples of behaviors that involve drug use, but are not innately tied to it, are not by their nature activities that require drug use, merely ones that drug use can be found in assemblage with. However, “Party and Play” is a far different beast to discuss. The two parts of party and play are relatively easily explained: the “party” involves use of drugs, mainly meth but also integrating others such as MDMA, GHB, and other club drugs, while the “play” is various forms of sex, whether it be relatively tame or a highly fetishized process of exchange and resignification wherein traditional sexual acts are resignified through acts of drug use. PNP literally cannot exist without drug use. Drug use is integral to it as a space, as a fetish, and while it varies the drugs used fall largely within a very narrow list specifically because of how these drugs are consumed, the effects they have, and the sexualization thereof. One not-uncommon act in more hardcore PNP groups is injecting another partner with crystal meth, an exercise in trust, control, and a kind of intimate penetration far more transgressive than any other, a phallic presence signified by the needle rather than by a phallus or phallic object inserted into an orifice. It is the creation of a new orifice, a radical reshaping of the body through the singularity of the needle’s point, and the dangerousness of this, the risks associated with it, are part of what make it a meaningful fetish. As Žižek says of fistfucking, there is a way in which the phallus is, now, inadequately phallic to serve as a proper sexual instrument, a more extreme one must be found.

Not all PNP is this extreme, even though injected use of methamphetamine is not unheard of in gay circles. For some, shooting crystal is more or less as acceptable as any other drug-related behavior, specifically due to the influence of PNP culture and the prevalence of meth more generally in gay spaces. In fact, in many places it is predominantly tied to the gay community, as a kind of currency within it due specifically to PNP’s popularity leading to a wider popularity of the drug in relation to other club drugs. If you’re in Nevada and looking for meth, you probably don’t have to go too far. In some parts of Southern California, it is only the second most common substance because you can buy weed easier than a pack of cigarettes. There are towns in Arizona that all but throw it at you, and at one point Missouri was the meth capital of the world. Meth is one of America’s favorite drugs, but if you’re in New York, it can be hard to come by. Nearby cities like Patterson and Newark on out to Kensington in Philly are dope havens, and if you go far enough uptown or downtown in New York you’ll find the same. And don’t get anyone wrong, dope is great. But dope dick won’t exactly satisfy most. And that’s where Tina comes to town in her Swarovski crystal dress: in NYC, meth is relatively rare outside of gay clubs, gay parties, and most meth users are involved in PNP scenes or at most a step removed from them, drug users who acknowledge the kinship between the two and may rely on it in order to get their own supply, sustain their own dealings, so on. And while meth is more acceptable to inject in certain circles than heroin is to use at all, by any route of administration, that there would eventually be some crossover is hardly surprising.

The popularity of heroin among gay users is less tied to sex and largely tied to the same factors that make alcohol, cocaine, and other drugs popular: lives of depression, rejection, isolation. This is even more true for trans people, given our experience in relation to embodiment as a concept, a process, a continual test of being and becoming. As an experience, heroin and other opiates are some of the drugs most similar in effect and affect to the sadomasochistic restructuring of the body, two of the approaches toward the Body without Organs (as laid out by Deleuze and Guattari) and two means of attaining a restructuring of the body that passes through an embryonic stage rather than requiring the traumatic breaking and restructuring of the body occur in a body that will fracture as a result, the embryonic body able to sustain such change due to its lack of definition. For trans women, heroin may not make us women, but the pain of becoming one is certainly helped by it. Heroin, when mixed with alcohol, benzodiazepines, cocaine, or meth (or really anything else) provides a unique, more euphoric experience, one where anxiety melts away and euphoria comes easily. Dope itself is often not sexualized, as lazing around and listening to music is usually more appealing on it than the effort needed to have sex. Rather than a strictly sexual component, the kinship between sex work and drug use, the way in which the two are commonly found near one another, with one inviting and invoking the other such that involvement in one is often tied with involvement in another. Whether to come down from an upper (smoking heroin to come down from MDMA was and remains a common Irish raver practice) or to add an analgesic to the pain of exploitation, its involvement in gay lives is hardly surprising, even if not as emblematic of glitz and glamour as cocaine, MDMA, and even meth.

To refer back to previous mentions of MDMA, while certainly not associated strictly with gay lives, the queerness of MDMA is hard to dispute, given the artistry with which MDMA pills are often crafted and the scenes in which they are distributed. Raves and gay fashion have frequently intersected, the music that forms the basis for most raves owes its origins in one way or another to gay (and black gay communities, specifically) innovation. The faggishness of rave culture, the effete style of PLUR dress codes, and the way that this is all sublimated back into heterosexuality gives all at once an overwhelmingly “queer” vibe to certain spaces and a sort of drought of any genuine queer identity, gay affinity, trans transgression, merely an apparition of it, a simulacra of rave culture. however, MDMA still can be found at gay clubs, raves, and so on, especially given the way that the Netherlands has begun exporting phenomenal pills in bulk quantities. Madonna dominating the dance floor is an issue of Voguing being in vogue, but the roots of house music, ballroom culture, the influence of both on popular culture and musical development cannot be ignored, and that so much of it rings with the metallic taste of MDMA is also undeniable.

Gay communities have a lot of drugs, are a frequently intoxicated sort of space, one in which intoxication as a means of restructuring transgression and reclaiming certain means of relation, resignifying them, is part of the experience, of what makes a community possible. To say there is no problem with this is to make a statement too far, but to say the opposite, to say that intoxication is a moral failure, is itself a statement that goes against both purposes of community and the reason that intoxication became so involved in them in the first place.

#drugs #pride

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groovesnjams · 4 years

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youtube

“Peppa Pig” by Leyla Blue (Prod. Y2K)

MG:

This may sound rich coming from the person who ended last year championing what they described as an adult Disney song, but “Peppa Pig” is gross. It’s gross when adults, ironically or un, consume content created explicitly for children. And before you “but Spongebob meme!” me, “Peppa Pig” doesn’t just reference the titular show extensively, Leyla Blue also drops in a little bit of the Alphabet Song and a reference to the Nickelodeon Kid’s Choice Awards. In fact, the breathy, twee, spoken word outro (“It was always my dream to get slimed”) is, at best, stomach churning fetish material and, at worst, blatant pedo-bait. That’s who enjoys a song like “Peppa Pig.” Pedophiles. There’s absolutely nothing cute about an adult woman ~rapping a bunch of children’s media.

DV:

I’m not sure I’d go as far as MG on this one! But “Peppa Pig” sounds to me like basically the flipside of 100 Gecs, in at least a few ways. This is shitposting, or clickbait, or some intersection of the two, in song form. Which is not a value judgment in itself! You can make a song that’s trashy and dumb and absolutely brilliant, and there are artists doing that - Superorganism inhabits this space too (if they still exist) and Bandcamp has a thousand others aiming for it from one direction or another. But where other bands are doing this with songs that can be catchy and memorable - even meaningful - Leyla Blue sounds hollow here, a stack of reference points read off flashcards while a type beat plays a little out of sync. The result is like Doja Cat, without the charm.

#music #peppa pig #leyla blue #y2k #actually we dont like doja cat either lol

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aliceslantern · 5 years

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Beyond This Existence, chapter 18

Summary: After Xehanort's death, Demyx finds himself unexpectedly human in Radiant Garden. With nothing but fragments of his past and a cryptic statement from Xemnas, he's left to figure out who he is. When Ienzo asks for his help with a project, the two find common ground, but the trauma and secrets in both of their pasts could tear it apart. Zemyx (Demyx/Ienzo), post-KH3 canon compliant Read it on FF.net/on AO3

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The weeks wore on, one into the other. Coping with the mass amounts of chaos in his memory never became easier, but at least it was bearable now that he was no longer so alone. Demyx’s days took on a quiet sort of comfort. Studying, songwriting, socializing, and yes, therapy. Telling someone else these things was hard, but keeping it to himself was even harder. Similarly, listening to Ienzo’s own stories was no cakewalk. Their lives had been infinitely complicated and troubling.

With all this behind them, there was a start of a real sort of life, not the odd buffering phase of the previous few months. The castle was no longer so dreadfully uncomfortable, conversations between Demyx and the others no longer so stilted. He was starting to develop real friendships with these people. Oddly enough, Demyx found that aside from Ienzo, he was closest to Even. He’d taken an interest in healing theory as well, though more as a pet fascination than a vocation. Every now and again, Even gave him tests. It was his own way of reaching out.

“... How’d I do?” Demyx asked. He hadn’t had much written education of any kind, but at least the tests were something concrete to work toward. More structured than Aerith’s “give me a call when you finish the book” method of teaching.

“In all? Not bad.” Even passed the papers back. “Chemistry is your worst subject. But you knew that.”

“It’s the math.” Demyx skimmed the results and found that, overall, he’d done better than he’d thought. “I just can’t understand it.”

“Well--when it comes to calculating molarity--it’s typically just memorization of the base compounds.”

“And algebra.”

“For some reason I highly doubt you’ll have to deal much with kinesthetics in your everyday work. And if you do I’m a phone call away. I rather enjoy figuring it out.” He started shuffling through the sea of papers on his desk. “It gives me something to break the endless tedium of my days, anyway.”

“You’re not going to work on the Replica Program anymore?”

Even drew the hair out of his face. “On one hand, I believe that project has reached its peak. The replicas have gotten to a point where they’ve developed their own personhood, and their own hearts. That was the goal, to a degree. I’m of course going to study them as they age to see if they live out the same lives as ordinary humans. On the other…” He waved his wrist, as though dismissively. “What right have I to create new life? Now that I am becoming human, I feel more responsibility towards the way these replicas are treated. It’s as if I were to give birth. I suppose there might be a medical application to the creation of vessels--say, if someone were to be seriously injured or lose all neurological function--but again, what right have I to continue to meddle with such forces?”

“I can’t help you with that one,” Demyx said.

“No, it’s something for me to puzzle over. In the meantime, I’m going to continue to reflect on the ongoing intersection between magic and science within my life. It seems… most apt.”

“Why did you become a scientist?”

“Hm?” The question seemed to throw him off-guard.

“You’ve been with Ansem longer than anyone else. Why’d you do it?”

Even thought about it. “Why is it you play sitar?”

Demyx shrugged. “It’s just part of me. Always has been. If it hadn’t been sitar it probably would have been some other instrument. That one just happened to be given to me first.”

“Precisely. It’s part of your core, perhaps for no real reason. Or many real reasons, if you subscribe to fate or a divine. That is how I feel about my research. I could not separate the essence that is “me” from it. This is merely another phase of my life, and so I need to adjust my work accordingly.”

“To what?”

“Something that I hope is meaningful. I do not yet know what exactly.” He smiled. “Learning to change and grow after nearly twelve years of stagnation is taking most of my concentration.”

“It’s hard, isn’t it?” he mumbled, more to himself than Even.

“Incredibly.” He cleared his throat. “I’ll quiz you on the next three chapters next week.”

Demyx sighed. “No problem.”

----

Demyx was headlong into these chapters when Ienzo found him. With half his mind he was trying to figure out how to make the song he played better, the other half trying to puzzle out the complicated terminology. He wasn’t aware of his surroundings.

“How is it going?” Ienzo asked.

Demyx jumped, a discordant note throwing him off the melody.

“Sorry. I didn’t mean to startle you.”

Demyx let Arpeggio disappear. “It helps me remember, if I play,” he said. “Otherwise I can’t focus. If I read a chapter enough while playing a certain song, it sticks. I tried it the other way. I don’t know how you guys learn stuff.”

“Everyone studies differently,” Ienzo said. “So you’re really going to do it?”

“That’s the plan,” he said. “She told me to read these before I came to her for the practical stuff.” Demyx shifted the books around.

Ienzo kissed him lightly.

“So what’s going on with you? I figured you were working on something, but I don’t know what.”

“Well, actually, that’s kind of why I came to find you.”

“The score? Ienzo, you realize I can just read it to you, right?” He hadn’t yet looked back at it. In a way, he wasn’t ready, even though he knew what the contents were.

He shook his head. “Not that. Though I would like to know what’s in it, if you’re not afraid to share. No.” He took the lexicon out from under his arm. “I’m afraid there’s something only you can help me with.”

He smirked. “What was it you said? “If you want to be alone with me you need only ask?””

“What? Do I really speak like that? Never mind-- no, this is something else.” Ienzo sighed. His cheeks were pink. “I want to go to the basement.”

Demyx bit his lip. He’d had a feeling this was coming. Ienzo had been making leaps and bounds dealing with his guilt. No doubt he wanted to make true peace with it. “Okay. Two things. First, not a great idea, all things considering. Second, why me? Why not Ansem or Even or someone else who was involved in the experiments?”

“You’ve got a weapon.” Very matter-of-fact.

He felt the blood drain from his face. “So--let me get this straight. You want to go to the basement--where it’s crawling with Heartless and god-knows-what-else, not to mention where you’ve seen enough horror to go gray prematurely--”

“I haven’t gone gray. This is my natural hair color.”

“Babe, the last time you remembered something half as horrible you went kinda ballistic. I don’t want you getting hurt.”

“I’ve healed since then,” he said. “I have this--” he held out the lexicon, “whatever it means. I think the only way I can find peace is by helping them. Talking with them. Maybe I can help them find some little bit of dignity.”

Demyx exhaled, exasperated. “And do you really trust me to defend you? I’m out of shape, and I have no idea how strong the Heartless down there even are.”

He frowned. “What is this really about?” Ienzo asked. “Are you truly afraid of a few Heartless?”

Demyx didn’t know what to say, just that his gut was telling him this was an awful idea. “I guess not,” he said. “I just… I’m afraid that going down there and seeing all that will change how I see you. And I don’t want that to happen.”

Ienzo took his hands. “I know that. And it might change your mind. But I… I need to do this. I hope you understand.”

Demyx knew what had happened in the basement. Maybe he didn’t know all the details--the how or why of it all--but he knew Ienzo had been involved in this dangerous human experimentation. He knew, factually, that Ienzo couldn’t really be at fault, that he’d been a child and too young to accept responsibility, especially since he'd been so manipulated. But at the same time, Demyx knew seeing all of it would be a different story. It would make it tangible. And yet. “You’d do the same for me. Alright. Let’s free some ghosts, or whatever.”

Ienzo kissed him. “I love you.”

“I can’t say no to you. But you knew that.” He marked the place in his book and set it aside. “I’d feel better if we got some supplies. And if you rested. You look exhausted.”

“So tomorrow?”

He nodded. “Tomorrow.”

----

Later that night, while Ienzo read in bed, Demyx headed down to Even’s quarters. Slick, hot anxiety was building inside of him, making him vaguely anxious. He knocked, was let in. Even was folding laundry. “Did you need help with something?” he asked. Then frowned. “You do not look well.”

Demyx didn’t know what to say. “Ienzo wants to go to the basement.”

He paused just the slightest. “Yes. And?”

“Well--what if something’s down there?”

“I thought you could adequately defend yourself now?”

“It’s not me I’m worried about.” He exhaled and pulled his hand through his hair. “He’s got the lexicon. What if he tries using his powers again?”

Even shook his head. “He’s aware of the risk. I doubt he’d try.”

“What if he doesn’t do it consciously?”

He raised an eyebrow. “I had the impression it took a lot of effort for him to traverse your memory.”

“But he couldn’t control it. I don’t know what this is going to entail. If I’m just going to beat up some Heartless, or maybe there’s nothing down there and this is just for closure. But what if.”

“Since when was forethought a strength of yours?” Even asked, almost bitterly. “Boy, now you’re making me worry.”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t know who else to ask.”

Even sighed. He set aside the socks he was folding. “Come along.”

They went down to his lab. Even pulled out a first aid kit, some ethers, and some potions. He approached another cabinet and took out a vial and a syringe still in its wrapping. He placed them on the table.

“You’re aware of the correlation at this point, of heart failure and overuse of power.”

“Well--yes.” The sight of the medicine made him shiver.

“I’ve been poking through our research. The reason why it struck Ienzo so intensely has largely to do with the fact that he quite literally grew up as a Nobody. Trying to adequately corroborate his humanity with a Nobody will served to heighten the risk. It may not happen again. Perhaps he’s adjusted. At the same time… it may.”

“What’s that?”

“A serum to induce sleep. Should he begin to exhibit the same symptoms, you should dose him. And then call for help. I’m giving this to you as a precaution only.” Even unwrapped the syringe, prepped it, and then capped it off. Demyx caught sight of the label on the bottle. He knew enough by now to recognize it.

“That’s a poison. Not a sedative.”

“Sleep akin to death,” Even said, as though quoting. “Better than actual death, is it not?” He held it out. Demyx didn’t take it.

“I can’t.”

“You must. This is--” He exhaled. “For goodness sakes, you might not even need it.” Even placed it on the table in front of him. “Have you tried convincing him out of it?”

“Yes. But how can we escape it? We live here. He’s reminded of it every day. If it’s not now, it’d be some other time.”

“The boy is… determined.” He sighed. “I’m trusting you with this. With him. Do you understand?”

Demyx nodded.

“So take it.”

He took all the medicine back with him, feeling sick. He hid the syringe in the first aid kit and tried to pretend it wasn’t there.

Ienzo was still caught up in his book. “Did you get everything you needed?” he asked.

“Oh, plenty,” he said breezily. “How do you feel?”

“Surprisingly, not as anxious as I thought.” He shut the book and settled down in bed.

“Can I… stay with you tonight?”

Ienzo frowned. “Of course.” He lifted the covers and let Demyx crawl in. He drew Ienzo close, breathed in his smell. “I’m not sure why you felt like you had to ask. You scarcely sleep in your own bed anymore.”

“Dunno. I figured you might want some time alone.”

“I have spent a lot of time thinking about this alone. I don’t mind the company.”

Demyx looked at him. His eyes bright and alive. He kissed him once. Ienzo settled down against him and was asleep before long.

Demyx did not sleep a wink.

----

Morning. Breakfast. He bathed, feeling vaguely numb and dissociated, slightly outside of himself. When he saw Ienzo in his apprentice’s coat, he almost wondered if this was a bizarre dream. He gathered up their bag of supplies.

“You sure you want to do this?” Demyx asked.

“Yes. I’m sure.”

He sighed. “Lead the way, then.”

He followed him through the corridors, through the familiar, then down dozens and dozens of stairs to a locked door. The air down here was cold, and it smelled dank and musty. Crystal sconces lit everything brightly, but at the same time he felt as though he was squinting in the gloom. At the door, Ienzo hesitated.

“Did you forget the code?” Demyx asked.

Ienzo summoned the lexicon. The soft rustle of its pages barely broke the suffocating silence. Demyx felt his heart in his throat. This was not a good sign. Ienzo meant business. Demyx tried to tell him then what might happen. But he had to know. There was no way he couldn't, right?

He punched in the code, and in they went.

It did not look dissimilar to the containment cells of the Castle that Never Was. Gray floor. Black and silver doors. Stark, harsh fluorescent light. A couple of these spaces were offices, and what looked to be a small lab. Papers were everywhere, all over the floors. Beakers had been smashed, a computer screen cracked. Ienzo took it all in with little emotion.

The smoky, musty smell only ever got stronger. “They smell us,” Demyx said. He brought an arm up in front of Ienzo automatically. He pushed it away.

“Not yet.”

They moved forward bit by bit. Ienzo absently touched the numbers on the cells, peeking inside here or there. Demyx didn’t see anything, but he could taste it. The cells were riddled with scratch marks, places where the floor had been gouged away. A sink bad been torn out of the wall. A mattress ripped to shreds.

“There’s no one here,” Demyx said.

“Don’t speak so soon,” Ienzo said.

A silhouette of pure darkness crawled out of the ground. It looked weirdly human in shape, more like a Novashadow than the little Shadows he was used to. It did not give chase, but seemed to merely watch them.

Darkness began to slither out of the back cells, forming yet more Shadows. “Freaky,” he hissed. The Keyblade snapped into his palm. One rose out of the pool and shuffled towards them. “Stay behind me.”

“Not yet,” Ienzo said. He crouched down, and Demyx almost screamed, but the darkness on the floor didn’t crawl over him like it normally would’ve. “Do you remember me?”

Was he talking to the Heartless? It paused, tilted its head.

“I was little then,” Ienzo said. “Not anymore.”

The Shadow twitched and shuddered. A few more peeked out. “What are you doing?” Demyx asked.

“Giving it the Sora treatment.” He exhaled. “Put that away. We’re not here to hurt you all. Isn’t that right?”

The blade in his hand trembled a little.

“Demyx?” Ienzo prompted.

He let it disappear. Raised his hands, as if to show how empty they were.

Ienzo smiled kindly at the Heartless. “You’ve been here for such a long time, so alone.” The lexicon opened to a random page, of a little girl. “Isn’t that right, Jamie? That’s you, right?” He held the book out to the Heartless. It seemed to stare at the page within, of the photo. “I wanted to apologize for all we put you through. There was a bad, bad man. He made all the people around him sick with evil. And they took it out on you. On me, too. And my friend next to me. That doesn’t make it right, but the bad man’s gone and everyone wants to help you.”

The Heartless seemed to convulse.

“I can’t imagine it’s fun down here. There’s nobody and nothing to play with. But there’s another place with lots of friends waiting for you.”

The Shadow raised a claw.

“Ienzo,” Demyx hissed. Ienzo held out his hand.

The Shadow placed its claw on the photo of the girl. It was not twitching anymore, not in the way Heartless usually did.

“Do it now,” he whispered. “She’s ready.”

He slashed. The Heartless had no defense; it was almost made of smoke. Its heart rose and vanished into nothing. Demyx was shaking. “Oh my god,” he said. “Are you… are you okay? I should’ve given you my coat.” He gave him a good once-over. No threads of darkness, no injury.

“I’m fine. Let’s keep going.”

“How many are there?”

“Left? I’m not sure. But these aren’t ordinary Heartless. This was the genesis.”

The Heartless, having seen all this, did not flee the way they were akin to when their brethren died. They came forward in a lump. They did not attack. They left plenty of space between them and Ienzo.

“They’re making a line,” Demyx said.

“They want to be free.” He smiled. His eyes were watering. “Who wants to know who they are?”

It took hours.

Ienzo gave nearly every Heartless the same speech, but he altered it slightly, peppering in details he must have read somewhere--information about a beloved pet, a favorite color, updates about loved ones who were still alive. Humanizing them. It was only once this semblance of humanity was found that they could go. Peacefully.

Even though the Heartless were weak, the fact that there was so many of them and that this was stressful to watch tired him. He waited for one to break rank, to attack and injure. None did, though.

“Are you alright?” Ienzo asked. Demyx had been standing to his right and noticed his full face for the first time in hours. He was sweating, his complexion washed out. Demyx swallowed. No.

“Just a bit out of shape,” he said breezily. “How are you feeling?”

“I feel fine.”

More speeches. More Heartless. Demyx was wondering if it was just his eyes playing tricks on him, or if Ienzo was looking worse. Pale. Shaky. No blood yet. But soon? The darkness was getting thinner and thinner until there were no more Heartless waiting.

“Is that it?” Demyx asked hoarsely. “I don’t know how much more of this I can take.”

“Yes, that was--” He calculated quickly, then furrowed his brows. “Ninety-nine. There’s one left. Maybe it’s hiding? Can you handle one more?”

“I think. You?”

He nodded. When he stood, his knees shook, and Demyx helped him up. He was getting weak. They had to get out of here, to get medical help. Demyx tried to covertly steer him in the opposite direction. “Why did they forgive me?” Ienzo asked.

“What do you mean?”

“The bitterness… they just let it go. Without fail. There was not even one rogue Shadow that tried to attack.” His eyes were wide.

“They’ve been here ten years,” Demyx said. “That’s a long time to suffer. Sometimes you have to let it go to make the pain stop.”

He looked at his trembling palm. “I see. I… understand.”

Demyx glanced over his shoulder. “I think we’ve found our stowaway.”

It was the humanoid Heartless, the first one they’d seen. They approached it slowly.

“We’re here to help,” Demyx said. “Do you want to go be with your friends?”

The Heartless paused. It twitched irritably.

“Ienzo,” Demyx said nervously. “Maybe start working your magic, yeah? My buddy here seems a little agitated.” He was positive that it was stronger than the last. Strength sapped, Demyx didn’t know if he could honestly take it on.

A hint of panic crept into Ienzo’s voice. “I can’t--” He started manually shuffling the pages. “I can’t find their--”

The Neoshadow hissed. Demyx drew his Keyblade. “Come on. Let’s talk this out,” he said. “I’m offering you a get-out-of-jail free card here, friend.”

Once it lay eyes in the Keyblade, the Heartless screamed. The sound almost incapacitated him, harsh, like razors against his eardrums. It leapt at him.

Demyx found himself awash in darkness.

#beyond this existence #demyx #ienzo #even #zemyx #demyx/ienzo

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gayasinstupidpodcast · 6 years

Photo

Gay As In Stupid’s second episode is out! (pun intended)

Hey y’all! It’s Isaac and Aaron and we’re back with another episode of our Fantastically gay podcast, Gay As In Stupid! This month’s episode is about gay trans experiences, where me and Isaac share some of our experiences as gay trans men, talk about the history of societal and medical prejudice, and share an interview with a spectacular trans lesbian on her point of view!

You can find us on the Itunes Podcast App/Webpage at Gay As In Stupid Podcast! You can also find our episodes uploaded to Youtube and Soundcloud! Sorry for any audio goofs this episode! Recoding in my college dorm has proven to be a thotty whom we will have to get used to working with.

Ordinarily, me and Isaac would put our main sources under Further Reading at the top, but I (Aaron) found the main sources I had to go through for this month’s topic to contain disgusting levels of transphobia that I would feel irresponsible telling our listeners to read. If you want to know what I looked through and used, however, feel free to DM me @albert-dj-cashier

Aaron’s 2018 September Recs!

What The Trans?! (podcast)

A roughly hour-per-ep podcast by Michelle and Ashleigh, two trans women living in the U.K! The hosts are witty, informative, and compelling, and they talk about topics like the current events in UK trans politics, representation in media, institutionalized prejudice, and personal experiences! Their episodes are really fun as well as interesting, and they have a great dynamic!

Big Eden

This is an absolutely Classic gay feel-good film, and one of me & my friend Lauren’s personal favorites! It centers around a gay New York artist who returns to his childhood home in Montana to care for his grandfather, and finds himself having to deal with the loose threads he left behind (and Also finds an unexpected love interest). It’s cute, romantic, super funny, and doesn’t leave you with long spans of meaninglessly meaningful shots and call it Film.

Isaac’s 2018 September Recs!

Yank! A WWII Love Story: A New Musical

Follows Stu, a young man who gets drafted into World War II where he ends up becoming a photographer for ‘Yank Magazine, a journal for and by the servicemen’. In present day, Stu’s old journal is discovered, and his story of the war, and his romance with Mitch; a handsome Private he met during training. It’s fun, colorful and absolutely heartbreaking. The songs are memorable, and so are the characters. If you like heart-string pulling gay romances and strong lesbians, this production will make you horny!

MIKA

If you aren’t already listening to MIKA, then I don’t think you’ve been living yet. His songs are sweet and fun to dance to, and truly never get old. He’s gay and a talented singer-songwriter. The music he makes can be best described as Pop/Glam Rock (also GAY!!!) Love yourself and go give “Talk About You” and “Grace Kelly” a listen.

MARCY’S FULL AND WONDERFUL INTERVIEW UNDER THE READ MORE

Q: How do you identify? A: I am a trans woman and a lesbian.

Q: How do you feel trans straight people react to your identity? A: honestly, I’m not sure. I don’t personally know any straight trans people. I’d imagine that we have common grounds on dysphoria and trying to understand gender, but with regards to sexuality, I’m sure it’s kinda up in the air. I doubt there’d be like, hostility regarding my identity. Probably just general acceptance, maybe some minor prodding.

Side note: not to generalize, but from what I understand, straight trans women tend to have different experiences with self-discovery than bi or lesbian trans women. The former tend to figure things out earlier, are sometimes seen as more traditionally feminine, etc. Some of this is from rather TERFy science, though, so take it with a grain of salt.

Q: How do you feel your identity is perceived in the LGBT Community? A: from an intracommunity standpoint, I think that trans WLW in general are steadily becoming more accepted as we speak up about or lives and experiences. Many cis WLW, whether actively or passively, exhibit an alarming amount of transphobic beliefs, but I like to think they’re in the minority.

Q: How do you present your gender and what do it mean to you? A: I’m butch, so my experience with womanhood and femininity is… interesting, to say the least. I certainly don’t take a traditional approach to femininity, and I find that very empowering, especially as a trans woman. I don’t wanna force myself into a role that I’m not comfortable filling, just to appeal to what society expects of me. I wear suits and vests and I keep my hair short and I’ve honestly never even touched makeup, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Q: What role do you feel like the intersection of your gender and your sexualilty play in your life? A: my gender and my sexuality are both very important to me, the intersection thereof even moreso. Understanding that intersection has helped me piece together a lot of the questions I had growing up. To put it simply, figuring out that I’m not just trans, but also a lesbian, has helped me figure out like, the past eight-to-ten years’ worth of failed romantic endeavors. The way I experience relationships, the way I interact with people, the way I love are all impacted by both my gender and my sexuality; neither’s importance can be understated.

Q: Do you feel like your gender presentation makes people more prone to invalidate your identity? A: pardon my language but, of fucking course. Like, cis people and transphobes alike will find any reason they can to invalidate a trans person. But the second they find a trans woman who’s a lesbian, who isn’t presenting like a perfectly feminine stereotype, all bets are off my dude. Until I have like, B-cup tits and a soft face, I’m essentially a straight guy in most people’s faces. Which, eh, who cares at this point? Straight people have never understood butch womanhood. I don’t expect them to recognize a trans butch when they see one.

Q: Do you feel like your identity as a gay trans person makes it harder for you to receive proper medical care (hormones, sexual health, etc)? A: quite honestly, I don’t know yet. I’m still pre-HRT; I have yet to jump through the hoops and red tape necessary to get hormones and whatnot. I imagine it’ll be tough, though.

Q: How has your coming out process been different than if you were just trans or gay? A: the biggest difference, for me at least, is that it’s been a multi-step process. For a while I thought I was a bi cis man, then pansexual and agender, then a bi trans woman, and it wasn’t until ~June 2017 that I figured out I was a trans lesbian. Coming out to friends has always been easy; they pick up on new identities and pronouns fairly easy. Honestly, I don’t think my parents quite understand what being trans is right now, but we’re working on it.

Q: Have you ever found yourself feeling guilty over your attraction to women because of your gender identity? A: honestly? At least once a week, I have that dysphoric voice in my head telling me I’m just some creepy straight guy preying on lesbians. I know it isn’t true, it’s just self-doubt and internalized transphobia and TERF rhetoric echoing, but it’s hard to not think that, frankly. Especially when it’s repeated so often.

Q: Do you feel like your voice is heard/your identity is seen between media and the community? A: in media? Outside of a few niche places (and surprisingly, IDW’s Transformers comics), trans lesbians are largely pretty nonexistent. Of course, in the actual community we’re much more populous, but frankly we’re a little bit insular as we tend to mostly befriend and date one another. All in all, don’t think we’re entirely invisible, but I do think we could do with some more fictional representation, and to get more involved with the larger LGBT community.

Q: Is there anything else about your experience as a gay trans person you would like to add? A: admittedly, it hasn’t been until recently that I’ve felt truly comfortable around cis lesbians. Most of my relationships in the past few years have been with other trans girls. There’s a variety of reasons for this, and every woman’s experiences are her own, but for a long time I was afraid that cis lesbians just wouldn’t recognize me as a woman. Q: Would you like your instagram/tumblr to be linked in the episode description? A: sure! I’m @opossumghoul on tumblr and @opossumbutch on other social media

#gay as in stupid podcast #Gay Podcast #lgbt podcast #LGBT Creators #lgbt #gay trans

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quadrantmusic · 3 years

Text

Tupac Essay

I wrote this essay in 2009 my Freshman year of college. It is on my old computer. I don't have a charger for my old computer. It is one of those old chargers. I will have to hopefully get one at some point. I wrote other stuff on that computer. That computer also has thousands of tape recorded rhymes on it. But I need the old kind of computer charger

I wrote this when I played basketball at UCSD so I was nervous and I could always rap well and write well when nervous I don’t know why but it always put me ina different state that was good. But they hurt me so I haven’t been able to play on a team and get nervous.

2PAC rapped what was the most meaningful, that came in the form of revelations from the heart, and thus his words and emotion function universally. PAC recycles a currency that builds upon itself and is also manipulated, constantly leveraging and expanding beyond itself. Pac, however, also is aware of the limitations of not only rap, but any art form in its mimetic necessity tied to human creation.

2PAC’s lyrics are crafted with the beat, with the timing, in a meaningful sequence in which the whole is greater than the sum of its parts and the removal of any aspect would devastate the creation. The brush strokes are not hidden. His masterpiece “Can’t C Me” embraces that it is man made. The rap begins with a man taking a breath to introduce PAC, humanizing himself and reinforcing its quality as a human creation. His early raps are not commercialized, modified, and distant in assimilatory fashion to be conveniently fitted into popular culture. His raps are alive, never resigning, moving every direction except closed, and still reverberating with the same intensity in its completion.

At the same time rap is a form of constrained writing. It mostly adheres to a general approximate time structure cut into 16 bar segments confined by a general conformity to rhyme that can be manipulated to convince a simultaneous expression of freedom. 2Pacs raps are not limited to benign belligerence and booty bouncing. In 2PAC’s reference and obsession to extremes in human behavior, he also points beyond them. This is a function of the use of rational, interpersonal compulsion against transcendent, melodic, yet unsettling harmonies. Pac’s music awakens, or opens the eyes of the viewer to the harsh realities of the world, yet simultaneously, through its creativity and expression, refuses the listener to resign to these.

The title “Can’t C Me” leaves out “you”. PAC is not merely saying that he is a figment of nothing to the listener, but he actually is no thing. Consequently he cannot be seen and if he is no thing, he cannot see the listener as well. C is the shape of a circle opened. He has escaped pidgeon-holing circumscription. Also C represents average. Functioning as a verb, he is saying he cannot be made average. It is also the third letter of the alphabet. Three reflects the west side sign with two fingers connected in the middle. On the album cover he points these to his forehead. Possibly three symbolizes a transcendence beyond duality (referencing his two fingers intertwined), metaphorically third eye vision. He says can’t as opposed to cannot. This is a sign of condescension and his sense of power over those who cannot see him.

By not using “see” PAC is alluding to something beyond vision associated with appearances. He is describing that, while he can be seen in the flesh, his true self exists in a dimension beyond the reducing effects of vision. In other words, PAC understands that he exists beyond the confines of his physical body. He proclaims “If you feel me, tell the tricks that shot me that they missed they ain’t kill me”. In so doing he confronts the listener with a paradox that defies his understanding of the self. The people or person who shot him hit his physical flesh, but did not hit “Him”. Again, PAC plays with the notion that he exists in a different dimension in sound, and accordingly cannot be felt in the literal sense. But going along with the notion that “he” exists beyond the physical, he is amorphous and can be felt. He could be stipulating that our essences do not exist in our separate bodies but in our transcendent connections and awareness that we are integrated in patterns beyond rational resolution. He extends “feel” to reflect that he is everywhere and amorphous.

The irony of living in a culture that degrades and disparages you is that it brings you to release consideration of your self, which is liberating. 2PAC’s raps are composed of a currency that he circulates. This currency is transparent, yet simultaneously mysterious. 2PAC’s currency, while mired to rational dichotomies of the world, attempted to transcend it in overall formal dynamic interplay. In so doing he let’s go of preoccupation of ego and content, for as a currency it is not directly connected with him but a rotation of expressions built from a sentiment. He does not try to inflate his ego, and ironically degrades himself. Paradoxically this empowers him and infuses his music with transcendence. He has nothing to lose, and as a result, gains everything. He emphasizes violence (possibly to compensate for the fact that it is often ignored), yet at the same time instills a sentiment that there is a zone that transcends the irreconcilable opposites of our consciousness transposed into the world. Thus his music moves on the intersection of scandalous violation and eternal grace.

Slang permeates 2PAC’s raps, and is due to the realization that language, like art, is limited in that it is tied to human creation and thus cannot express the Truth behind the sentiment to speak or produce artwork. Slang can be adopted due to the underlying spiritual aspiration to express without preoccupation with impressing. Nigger is appropriated by PAC, as are other derogatory terms imposed on oppressed “groups”, to take away the pain and seriousness of the word imposed on them and to build themselves up to take verbal abuse. PAC transforms “nigger” into an amorphous boomerang. Slaves developed their own subtle forms of communication so as to communicate without being found out. Slang can undermine the English language that ‘blacks’ adopted from the ‘white man’. 2PAC’s slang was original and was used before it was repackaged and assimilated into culture. Only those on his plane, with his vocabulary and dialogue could understand the content of what he is saying. People get so caught up in his controversial lyrics and cursing that they do not see the subversive undertone and message. But the magnificence of his music is that it is not confined to content. The C also looks like an eclipse before it is realized. Eclipses are symbolic of darkness, or the dissolution of appearances. Those with receptivity to the complexities yet transcendent simplicity of 2PAC’s consciousness could understand that 2PAC is trying to bring about “2PAColypse”, or the death of dichotomy, when blackness takes over the light.

The title “Can’t see me” and the name of the album “All Eyez on Me” plays on the notion that music plays in a dimension that can simultaneously be anywhere and nowhere, shrinking space and time, yet the artist remains out of sight. The title of the song reflects the nature of good rap. Good rap is a formless art composed of transparent, ephemeral forms. 2PAC doesn’t tell you what you want to hear, or show you what you want to see. The significance of rap as a form of art is that it, if good is never a closed system. The listener cannot get stuck on one thing for too long as it is constantly flowing and hitting him with new lines and patterns and tones. Yet paradoxically his raps are presented with and pervaded by an order, pattern, and structure that allow memorization. He who cannot appreciate the underlying significance of the formal elements of 2PAC’s raps would immediately tune out. This memorization does not just consist in spoken word but rhythm and tone. Thus his raps can inculcate a message and sentiment beyond the immediately apparent.

PAC understands that the ghetto is the product of exploitation and manipulation by the status quo. PAC says “witness what hell made”. PAC associates “whites” with devils. He is throwing in the face what the silent majority finds convenient to overlook. Ironically, now the world has no choice, and the chaos and anarchy is coming back around. PAC describes “Visions of cops and sirens”. Visions occur when one wakes up from a daze, and often come in spurts that are fought off. The tide is turning as the upper tier of the status quo is amerced in its self-made disorder that it can no longer contain. By alluding to guns and sirens PAC is suggesting that witnessing is more than just seeing. Guns and sirens can be heard too and with a more frightening effect. PAC subtly calls “whites” “nigger”. He exclaims, “Ask me why I’m a boss player getting high, and niggers wonder why they can’t see me”. He poses this as a rhetorical question. Ironcially, he is saying, the group in power created “him”, the “boss player getting high” and can’t except it. The term boss subverts dominant notions. PAC extends the words high and by, which could also be hi and bye, playing on words in rhythmic juxtaposition. The listener could picture him (not see; there is a difference) in a fancy car. If that person is rich and white it could trigger envy; envy could also be emoted from a poor black person. Either way, PAC is claiming his space and letting his presence known. I propose that he encourages the listener to give into that envy, possibly so he could eventually find that pursuit of riches due to competition is ultimately empty and thus become open to the possibility of losing consideration of his “self” as well. PAC extends and accentuates dieeee as well, suggesting he will never die. He is the one with the power.

The deafening, ringing sound in the middle evokes a sense of slowly devolving and descending, as if Pac has finally caught you and is taking you into a pit deeper and deeper into the darkness. At the same time playfulness undergirds the song, compensating PAC’s serious tone and manipulating the listener to follow. It seems at any moment PAC is going to jump out of the speaker and say “boo”. PAC commands “Visualize what you can’t see”. What cannot be seen is the unknown, and entering the unknown always entails fear. A sense of power permeates the song. The listener is in 2PAC’s realm; he is in control.

One could say that within PAC’s music is a Marxist undertone and sense of power. Nevertheless, PAC adheres, and in fact, seems deeply mired to the dualistic consciousness used to enslave black people in the first place. But 2PAC also realizes that black people cannot be trusted. In fact, he proclaims “it’s me against the world”. He makes references to the white man, and the devil in other songs, but never adheres to a groupish white v. black mentality. He understands that there are complexities underlying black/white dichotomies. He even goes so far as to say “I can’t trust myself”.

Race is a social construction, not based on biology, manufactured by the group in power in order to entrench power into itself. A key component to the perpetuation of race-consciousness is to satisfy the ego’s desire to feel superior. This desire to be superior underlies all other categories as well. PAC is noted for his beef with East Coast rapper Biggie. The East West Coast feud was a domination struggle and part and parcel with domination struggles is oppressive structures under new produced encapsulations. When not introduced to a broader awareness, discontent due to oppressive structures can be driven within the categorized oppressed groups into encapsulated forms of internal strife such as racism, sexism, and geographical bias. 2PAC in his music becomes an actor in the existence of these categories, and he emphasizes their existence so overtly that he almost satirizes them. The passion with which he adheres to binaries is so intense that it points beyond them and himself to a yearning to transcend them. This I argue is the effect 2PAC wishes to produce. Everything in the universe puts itself first so it can become strong enough to break out of its protective enclosure. While people interpreted the West Side as being a beef reflecting geography, it in fact represented PAC’s desire to be a part of something larger than his “self”. Biggie was PAC’s effigy, representing an aspect of himself that he hated and was delivered from in death. By the end of PAC’s life his music reflects a transcendent awareness that a dimension exists beyond categorization and hierarchy. I believe that PAC’s life and death, whether staged or not, represents an art form of deliverance from dualistic thinking as represented in Biggie and PAC’s deaths.

In his glorified “Thug Life” Pac inculcates a principle to live by, a force to rally under, and an instrument for revolution, instilling fear in the upper tier and trust in a force of alliance and a super ordinate goal in the lower. In short he breathes a spirit of resistance essential for the healthy emergence of a new social order.

The rap induces in the listener a multidimensional sensory overload. Encouraged to see, feel, listen, and manipulated through a variety of emotions ranging from amusement to fear, he is almost brought to a state of numbness. The rap finishes with the distorted words of women saying “you can’t see me” and abruptly ends. The silence at the end is accentuated by the intensity preceding it. 2PAC trusts that there is a space beyond the dissonance and a silence that transcends silence. 2PAC in a sense attempts to dance the listener to a standstill.

It is human nature to dilute what is not readily understood into manageable chunks. The background voice in the rap warns the listener to, “stay off his dick”. There is a temptation to reduce transcendent qualities in PAC’s music, consequently diluting the experience. The form of his rap speaks to the subconscious, permeating the steal cage of content preoccupation sustained by constructed frameworks of thinking and understanding. Rap puts words into continuum and words that do not necessarily need to have a schematic connection. Yet it is often still within a structure of sense, pattern, and meter, keeping it within touch of the listener, while its constant flow simultaneously eludes him. It can be used to echo a rhythm and lyricism of a certain time and place or capture a consciousness. Nonetheless recorded speech entails concern with an ego, which is a primary limitation of rap. PAC avoided this by working with a currency that was developed from the spirit of his age with an awareness of the timeless.

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creativesage · 5 years

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(via The Magic That Makes Customer Experiences Stick)

By Stefan Thomke

The most memorable experiences are suffused with emotion — not extra features or value for money.

A participant in one of my Harvard Business School executive education classes told a story about a family trip to Walt Disney World in Orlando, Florida. She lost her purse in the park on the very first day: tickets, money, IDs, all gone. The highly anticipated vacation seemed all but over before it had begun. But when the family turned to a Disney employee for help, he gave them food vouchers and park tickets for the next day. And while the relieved family was enjoying the park, Disney employees searched for the purse — and found it. The executive enthused to my class: “Wow, what a company!”

Over the years I have heard hundreds of such stories in my classes. I ask students to tell them as part of an effort to develop principles that can be applied to the design of great customer experiences. This field of customer experience (CX) design — which aims to ensure that customers have positive touch points with companies while buying and consuming their products and services — has grown quickly in recent years. Research has shown that memorable experiences, and the ensuing positive word of mouth, can drive customer decisions as much as, if not more than, price and functionality.1 To that end, consultants have created thoughtful tools and frameworks such as journey mapping, service blueprinting, and problem-solving mindsets. Academics have studied customer engagement models that focus on managerial variables such as employee selection, training, rewards, and service culture. Yet recent research reports suggest that there have been few, if any, meaningful improvements in customer experience over time.2 Despite the insights gleaned about customers through advanced technologies and data analysis, something still seems to be missing for most companies.

My classroom experience points to the missing ingredient: emotion. Years ago, when I first asked students for their most memorable experiences as customers, I was surprised by the language they chose: Made me feel special. Showed empathy. Really cared. Personalized the process. Trusted me. Didn’t argue or delay. Killed us with kindness. Owned the problem. Surprised us. Made things simple. These executives weren’t using the standard language of business. They weren’t using terms like functional value, efficiency, and cost-value analysis. Instead, they were describing emotional impact. Their feelings of surprise, delight, happiness, relief, empathy, and more defined their most memorable experiences.

The stories they shared — along with a deep dive into research on the many components of decision-making — led me to a critical insight: Customers want their choices to align as much with their feelings and senses as with their values and ethics. The rational approaches taught at most business schools — offer customers more value for money, add features, make service more efficient — are not enough. Creating memorable experiences for customers also requires a bit of emotional magic. This article explores how that can work, drawing on several company cases to illustrate. People like to think of themselves as logical, but the truth is that emotions inspire decisions.

Research on human cognition and behavior supports the idea that customer experiences should be as infused with emotion as they are with logic and rationality. “The essential difference between emotion and reason is that emotion leads to action while reason leads to conclusions,” writes neurologist Donald Calne in Within Reason: Rationality and Human Behavior. Psychologist Richard Lazarus clarifies this idea in his book Emotion and Adaptation, where he argues that cognition (thinking), emotions (feeling), and motivation (acting) work as a system, with emotions serving as the critical go-between. Lazarus says that events — and by events he means everything from experiencing an earthquake to shopping for shoes — trigger a cognitive appraisal and an emotional reaction before we come to a decision on what to do. This process helps explain the many studies described in behavioral economist Dan Ariely’s book Predictably Irrational in which people behaved irrationally. We overpay, underestimate, procrastinate, and so on because we are emotional beings, not rational automatons.

The behaviorists’ theories and results are borne out by quantitative research. A Forrester Research study found that customer loyalty is driven more by emotional factors than by rational ones.3 Another study, by CEB Marketing Leadership Council and Google, suggests that this may also be true in B2B decisions. They surveyed 3,000 B2B buyers across 36 brands and interviewed 50 B2B marketing organizations, and found that personal value (appeal to emotions) has twice the impact of business value (appeal to logic and reason) on favorable decisions.4

The payoff can be huge. A report from Gallup suggests that organizations that optimize emotional connections outperform rivals by 26% in terms of gross margin and 85% in terms of sales growth.5 They cultivate emotionally engaged customers who are less price sensitive, less likely to buy from competitors, and three times more likely to recommend and repurchase.

Celebrate the Outliers

Ask yourself this: Is your company trying to minimize complaints or maximize customer delight? Given the research I’ve cited, you might think that every company would be trying to create dynamic, delightful customer journeys infused with emotion. You’d be wrong. Many focus almost solely on complaints. Their goal: Eliminate the customer’s pain at every point where the consumer and the company intersect. It’s a myopic strategy that leads to consistent mediocrity, because companies miss much of what the customer experiences on his or her journey.

Today’s customer journey is not just a matter of a few touch points as the consumer systematically narrows choices. Instead, most consumers take an iterative and expansive journey. They consider multiple perspectives, often through the use of social media. They interact with other people and other products and services. The journey between visiting a company’s website, say, and making an actual purchase is an emotional, cognitive, and motivational process. It’s the mix of those forces that creates feelings, memories, and stories about an organization, whether positive, negative, or ambivalent. It’s this variability that creates opportunities for companies to deliver memorable experiences. Rules and standardization can get in the way (see “Reducing Variability Can Eliminate Terrible and Great Experiences”), because sameness is forgettable.

Reducing Variability Can Eliminate Terrible and Great Experiences

When companies focus on reducing variance in customer experience, eliminating outliers, they make sure that, statistically speaking, as many customers as possible occupy the middle of a normal distribution curve. Terrible customer experiences get a lot of attention, which reinforces the strategy of standardizing operating procedures and laying down more rules. Imposing controls helps bring experiences closer to expectations. While eliminating bad experiences may reduce complaints, result in fewer angry customers, and trim costs, the unanticipated consequence of moving most customers to the middle of distributions is that it will also result in consistent mediocrity. They will have undifferentiated, average experiences, which will leave them with few, if any, memories.

For that reason, positively varied emotional journeys can have the richest payoff. They leave indelible memories, increase customer loyalty, and have multiplier effects in a world where customers are closely connected.6 For companies that embrace variability, even terrible experiences that spawn negative emotions — such as that lost purse at Disney World — are an opportunity.7 If the company surprises and delights the customer by efficiently and innovatively resolving his or her problem, the dominant emotion, the one that lasts in memory, will be positive. The managerial challenge is clear: how to infuse customer journeys with emotion.

Building Emotion Into Customer Experiences

Bringing emotion into customer journeys isn’t easy. Triggering a specific emotion at a particular touch point doesn’t guarantee anything. Instead, companies must address the customer journey holistically, understanding that people may remember emotions generated anywhere along the way. In my work over the last few years, I’ve identified five ways to do this.

1. Stimulate the senses. Sensory stimulation triggers emotions such as surprise, trust, joy, and even anticipation. Through products from cars to smartphones, clever companies use the senses to create emotional experiences.

At Ferrari, for example, automobile design is more than an exercise in efficient engineering. It’s also a process that taps into the driver’s senses to create an emotionally rich experience, from the pleasing sight of the car’s body to the exhilarating roar of the engine.8 Ferrari uses plush interior materials such as fine leather, even though this gives lighter, faster competitors a 5- to 10-kilogram advantage. The company also experiments with advanced technology, engine placement, tire dimensions, and the nuances of wheel movement to impart a feeling of control as you steer through tight corners or accelerate laterally. Compared with the fear you might feel in other sports cars as your back wheels fishtail, there’s a sense of power and achievement here, of believing that you are an exceptional driver steering the car to new heights of performance.

The story of how Ferrari struggled to get the sound right for its turbocharged 488 also illustrates how much attention it pays to emotions. For years, Ferrari worried that turbocharged engines, which can flatten intake and exhaust sounds while introducing annoying tones such as whistling, would detract from the pleasure of driving. At Ferrari, sound is a critical component of what a car buyer expects and enjoys. Indeed, there’s real evidence that customers associate sound with performance. Could Ferrari engineer turbo engines for an emotionally pleasing driving experience?

Using a proprietary sound simulator, the equivalent of three Ferrari engineers and drivers worked full time for two years on the problem. One of the team’s recommendations — increase the exhaust diameter from 63 to 70 millimeters — had extensive ripple effects for engineers and company managers. Implementation was difficult and time-consuming.

That kind of investment might seem excessive at other companies, but not at Ferrari, which places great value on the emotions behind the driving experience. The 488 has garnered praise and prizes for its sound and performance, winning the 2018 International Engine of the Year award in Stuttgart, Germany (rival Porsche’s hometown), and being hailed as Robb Report’s Car of the Year in 2016. Ferraris may not be the fastest or the most comfortable cars, but the company focuses on producing the best combination of the two, making their cars among the world’s most thrilling and luxurious.

Stimulating the senses doesn’t mean creating sensory overload. Some of the best examples of sensory appeal are ones where complexity gives way to simplicity. Apple products are known for this. From the original Mac to AirPods and iPhones, the company repeatedly hides cutting-edge technology behind a simple user interface that customers love. Few competitors have been able to achieve that. Samsung, for example, trails Apple in user experience even though, feature by feature, its products are often superior.

The power of sensory simplicity is at work at HappyOrNot (HON), a small Finnish startup that measures businesses’ customer satisfaction through polling.9 The central challenge is how to gather enough responses to support meaningful conclusions. Few customers have the time or inclination to fill out long, boring surveys.

HON tackles this problem with radical visual and tactile simplicity. Near the exits of department stores, airports, dining halls, drugstores, supermarkets, and other establishments, HON installs a terminal with four big push buttons. The green ones have smiley faces, and the red ones have frowny faces. The shades of the most smiley and most frowny are darker than the other two. A small sign asks customers to rate their experience by pressing one of the buttons. A HON terminal can prompt thousands of reactions in a single day. In fact, with terminals in over 100 countries, HappyOrNot’s buttons have prompted well over 600 million responses from customers. That’s more than all the customer ratings posted to sites like Yelp, TripAdvisor, or Amazon. The clarity of the colors is important, but the company believes that the satisfying tactile experience of pressing a button is the primary driver of this extraordinary participation.

2. Turn disappointment into delight. If your company is going to value the outliers, it must be ready to transform negative experiences into positives, as the hotel manager did in this story:

After a long transcontinental flight, my tired family arrived at a Taj Group hotel in India in the middle of the night. The front desk couldn’t find our reservation. Still, the night manager immediately took us to a room so we could go to bed right away, and even gave us an upgrade for the inconvenience (we waited less than five minutes!). He didn’t ask for a credit card or anything. When we woke up, the problem had been solved — and it wasn’t the hotel’s fault. Our booking agent had made a mistake.

I’ve heard many variations of this story (you may have, too), but the gist is always the same. By resolving a problem that he didn’t cause, the night manager delivered an experience that was remembered for years. When employees are taught to be in tune with the customer’s emotions, they can notice changes in emotional state and respond quickly. As their alacrity accelerates the shift from disappointment to delight, the intervention creates a sudden contrast that makes experiences sticky. (See “Capitalizing on Emotional Transitions.”)

Capitalizing on Emotional Transitions

By turning disappointment into delight, companies can create emotionally memorable experiences and win customers who will sing their praises.

Magicians, who constantly think about the audience experience, understand the emotional value of rapid shifts from disappointment and confusion to happy resolution. They have developed techniques to change people’s emotional states. For instance, a magician may allow members of the audience to believe that they have figured out the trick or caught him in a mistake, only to end it in a way that shows the audience had no idea what was really going on. Their momentary disappointment at their failure to “catch” the magician quickly transforms into delight in his excellence. Disappointment to delight: Magicians know that this emotional transition will wow audiences more than a constant flow of technically perfect tricks. The former creates memorable moments, while the latter may cause eyes to glaze over.

3. Plan to surprise. Good magic also upends expectations in order to engage people emotionally. For instance, the well-known magician Doug Henning developed an illusion in which an assistant would float on water, with a fountain providing cover for the support mechanism. But then magician David Copperfield, aware that audiences may have figured that out, took the trick further. Anticipating their reaction, he turned off the fountain, and the assistant remained floating — which surprised and impressed even people who knew of Henning’s show.

Like magicians, companies can thrill customers again and again through continual innovation and unexpected solutions to problems, building a loyal, delighted following for their products and services.

Creating those moments of surprise is often the result of paying attention to the smallest detail. When former Sony CEO Kazuo Hirai set out to turn around the company’s TV business in 2011, for instance, he discovered a fundamental problem.10 While the designs for Sony’s new TVs were beautiful, some customers said they found their sets ugly because the cables couldn’t be concealed. Armed with that knowledge, Hirai started responding in the same way to every new design: “I’m still seeing cables, and I don’t want to see the cables.” It took three years for the engineers to truly get the message. Hirai was teaching them that details matter to the customer, and that Sony would never develop winning products if it didn’t pay attention to the feelings its products evoked.

Sony eventually found a way of concealing the cables. As Hirai expected, customers were delighted by the surprise of not seeing the wires they had grown so accustomed to disliking and tolerating. Hirai, who recently retired as Sony’s chairman, told me: “Everything we do at Sony needs to have that ‘Wow, this is pretty cool’ element. … We don’t compete on functional specifications [anymore], but on people’s emotional experiences.”

Some companies try to inspire a desire to surprise in their employees. The Oberoi Group, a global hotel chain based in Delhi, India, gives its employees funding to surprise guests by turning problems into opportunities.11 Team members get funding to create such moments of delight; in 2013, employees logged more than 30,000 examples of this kind of problem-solving. Similarly, an equipment company has given its front-line employees a considerable budget to solve customer problems — without having to ask for approval. Company leaders call it the memorable experiences budget. Empowering employees with resources can extend your ability to surprise and delight your customers.

4. Tell compelling stories. A good story, well told and repeated often, is a powerful way to create an emotional connection between customer and company. For most of our existence, oral narratives have been a primary means of learning, socializing, and transmitting knowledge, so we are conditioned to understand, remember, and tell stories. Companies that infuse them into the customer’s brand experience can provoke an emotional response and create sticky memories.

Consider A. Lange & Söhne (Lange), a watchmaker with East German roots and a fascinating history.12 In 1990, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Walter Lange resurrected the company started by his great-grandfather, F.A. Lange, which had all but disappeared during the previous decades. Instituting a focus on innovation and craftsmanship, he propelled Lange into the ranks of the world’s finest brands with the launch of its first wristwatches in 1994.

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With products that can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, Lange knows it must position itself as a paragon of innovation, excellence, and diligence. One story it tells to reinforce that image is about the assembly of its watches. Every Lange timepiece is put together by hand — twice. When the first assembly is complete, the watch is taken apart. Every part is cleaned, and the watch is then assembled anew. During the second assembly, the watchmaker can make small adjustments based on the first assembly. The tangible result may improve the watch’s accuracy by perhaps one or two seconds a day. The intangible result, arguably, is more important. Lange’s double assembly process communicates the essence of the company and its products. It tells the world that Lange cares so much about creating perfect products that it routinely does something that rivals regard as inefficient. Even though few customers can discern any difference between a watch assembled once and another assembled twice, the story is told and retold in Lange’s marketing materials, in personal interactions with customers, and, most powerfully, through word of mouth.

Storytelling techniques have played an important role in the reemergence of the mechanical watch industry more broadly, after battery-powered quartz watches made mechanical ones nearly obsolete. In a study that included 136 interviews with senior executives, watchmakers, distributors, retailers, historians, and museum curators and a review of extensive archival data, my Harvard Business School colleague Ryan Raffaelli found that the reemergence “involved a cognitive process of redefining both the meanings and values associated with the legacy technology.”13 Mechanical watchmakers used literary devices — metaphors and analogies — to distance their products from the negative perceptions most people had of cheap quartz watches. Said one executive, “We don’t sell watches. We sell dreams.” Others compared the watch to the human body, creating an empathic connection between customers and the mechanical parts of the product they were eyeing. Raffaelli writes, “Several people likened the oscillating balance wheel of the mechanical watch to a ‘beating heart,’ describing the watch’s gears as part of a ‘living organism’ that needed to be ‘fed’ with daily winding. A CEO stated, ‘A mechanical watch has a soul, it has a heart, it has life, it has something breathing inside of it.’” Described in this way, the watch essentially becomes a protagonist, which encourages customers to connect with the brand on a human level.

This kind of storytelling is yet another form of emotional magic that companies can perform. Before a trick culminates, magicians often walk an audience through the various steps just taken (“You picked a card, I turned around, you placed the card in the deck ... ”). The purpose is to focus the audience on what they should remember, omitting anything that might be inconsistent with the intended effect. The reframing becomes the new reality, shaping people’s memory of and feelings about the trick in a positive way. Good storytelling can do the same for companies, reinforcing positive emotions that cement the relationship between a customer and a brand.

5. Run controlled experiments. Even companies intent on infusing emotion into their customers’ journeys have a terribly hard time predicting which triggers will prompt customers to act. The question companies must ask is not simply “What works?” but “What works where, when, and for whom?” And more often than not, they should be prepared for dead ends in their search for answers. To give just one example, only 10% to 20% of the web experience improvements attempted by Google and Bing yield positive results.14 Scoffing at those percentages would be a mistake. Smart companies in businesses as diverse as high tech, media, retail, financial services, and travel know that controlled experiments and learning from those that don’t pan out are necessary components of designing emotionally powerful customer experiences.

Booking.com, the travel accommodations aggregator, is relentless in its focus on optimizing user experiences and in its experimentation to that end. At any point in time, Booking.com’s staff may be running more than 1,000 live tests. (About three-fourths of the company’s 1,800 core product and technology employees are involved in testing.) Most are so-called A/B tests, where the company sets up two experiences for users: A, the control, is usually the current system, and B, the treatment, is a modification — such as a new layout, a new pricing model, or new wording for a customer communication — that attempts to improve something for customers. Customers are randomly steered to one of the two experiences, and the resulting metrics are compared. The test’s winner then becomes the current system — until a future modification, tested in the same way, replaces it.

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The goal of some tests is to discover tactics that elicit emotions such as surprise and joy (from getting a terrific deal), fear (of missing out on a deal or a room), or a feeling of accomplishment (for successfully organizing a trip).15 These experiments have taught Booking.com a lot. For instance, “please book now or you will lose this reservation” and “only three rooms left” are appeals that spur more customers to make Booking.com reservations. Such messages may play on users’ fears, but the end result is that they replace the uncertainty customers feel when they log on with the satisfaction of finding a place to stay at a good price. The experiments are far from perfect — 9 out of 10 tests fail to have an impact on key performance metrics (for example, conversion rates) — but they inch the company closer to fulfilling its mission: taking the friction out of travel.

About a decade ago, magician Jason Randal was teaching a protégé, Kevin Viner, how to deliver memorable experiences. They tell me their conversation went something like this:

JR: “What are you doing at a party or show?” KV: “I am entertaining people.”

JR: “What are you really doing?” KV: “I am doing magic.”

JR: “What are you really doing?” KV: “Card tricks, rope tricks, coin tricks. …”

JR: “What are you really doing?” KV: “Now I am confused.”

JR: “When I perform at a show or a party, my goal always is to change how people feel, for the better. Magic is just a way to get me there. If I keep that goal in mind, I find that I am much more effective than if I go to a show just to do magic tricks or to make money.”

Viner, who now performs all over the world, says that this insight about changing people’s emotional state was so profound that it transformed the way he approaches performances. Like Viner, companies that go the extra mile to change how customers feel are more likely to create great experiences that will never be forgotten.

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seotipsandtricks-me · 5 years

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The world of online fashion is continually evolving to meet the demands of savvy consumers and how you communicate, perceive trust and provide a service is more important than ever… but that’s far easier said than done. With ever-growing competition, there are plenty of challenges but likewise, from initial search through to the final stages of a purchase, there are many opportunities for marketers to implement new strategies and produce a positive impact for sales conversions – and customers. Remember, this is about you working with your audience, standing out in the overcrowded digital landscape and giving shoppers the answers, opportunities, and confidence to easily buy from you. Conversion rate optimisation (or CRO) isn’t about just optimising technical performance – it’s about creating a user-centric site with an intuitive design that guides your core audience towards a purchase. So – to make it happen, there are 5 essential steps to follow in order to understand, engage, serve and sell to your ideal shoppers – Define your brand and your audience Do your research – products, competitors, brand and customer journey Present a lifestyle – not just a soulless product Give new and existing customers alike objectively great service Simplify search, avoid option paralysis and guide the customer Let’s get started! Define your brand and your audience To craft an engaging shopper journey that converts well, it’s important to match up who you are as a brand and the type of products and services you offer, with specific audiences who you can be confident, will have a strong reason to buy from you. Let’s start off simple. Ask yourself, who are you? What image and service do you want to provide? How do you achieve this? Do John and Jane Smith care about that fancy homepage animation? Is your copy providing the right message or is it just a distraction? On average, we judge a site in 0.05 seconds and if you can’t convince them in that time that you are a safe, sensible option for purchaser then…well…you’re saying goodbye to the visitor before you’ve really had a chance to say hello. Brands have to both differentiate themselves from the competition, while also delivering an image (and site functionality) that is familiar enough for audiences to feel comfortable, at-home and engaged enough to explore further. The first step in almost any meaningful conversion rate optimisation strategy is to ensure that you’re not actively pushing customers away – so those initial moments (when visitors are assessing your brand, product and site functionality ) really do count. Digital strategy and some quite traditional marketing principles around brand-building, design and the market-fit of products intersect here but central to everything is an understanding of the multiple audiences you can realistically sell to. The more equipped you are to use data insights around their age ranges, sex, location, lifestyle and a myriad of other demographic traits, the more insight you have to provide experiences that captivate users and provide a positive experience. While you can make very good use of heavy-duty market surveys, focus groups and so on, the fact is many of your competitors won’t have even made a start on truly getting to know their audiences. Nathan Fulwood of CreateFuture emphasises that going down a highly complex route of testing isn’t necessary to give rich, actionable insights; “So many teams tie themselves in knots with complicated A/B or multivariate scenarios and experiments. Avoid this. Pick one hypothesis, run it and learn. Then two, then four…” Putting ego and assumptions to one side and using tactical surveys, straightforward A/B testing and just simply talking to your audience will open up new sources of insight and allow you to develop better experiences. Knowing who you are as a brand (and the value of your products) isn’t just about the aesthetic elements of design or using grand language to talk about how desirable your products are. Demonstrating quality and building interest by building your customer journey and website experience around the motivations, needs, goals, and preferences of potential shoppers – in terms of what they want from your products, and from a site selling those products – will bring them closer to a purchase. In short – show, don’t tell. Do your research – products, competitors, brand and customer journey In eCommerce operations there can be some big trust barriers. Unlike a retail store, you can’t try on, touch and investigate the products you might be interested in buying. In this sense, known brands certainly have an advantage over independents when it comes to online retail. One way to build confidence in the desirability and quality of your products – and your ability to deliver them in a hassle-free fashion – is through reviews, testimonials and ratings. Before you can anticipate great reviews, you first have to have a promise that you want to deliver to customers – a solid value proposition that shoppers can frame their experience against. This isn’t just a slogan – this is the main reason or reasons why you are a logical shopping choice and why you should be chosen in this ever-expanding world of eCommerce options. Doing the research to develop a robust and objective understanding of where you fit within your chosen market – as a premium offering or accessible, budget option – will help to inform your value proposition, meet shopper expectations and optimise conversion rates. The goal is to provide an elegant, seamless customer journey and map up what you know about your audience and their expectations of your products into a straightforward experience. CEO of User Vision Chris Rourke emphasises that a comparatively small amount of usability testing can produce a game-changing amount of actionable data to align your brand and on-site experience with customer expectations; “If you want to understand the user behavior, another powerful method is usability testing. Even with a few representative users performing realistic tasks, you can learn loads of things from their behavior and opinions that can be applied as part of an iterative continuous improvement programme.” The more research you can do about your potential customers (and how competitors position themselves, their products and craft their own customer journeys) the more equipped you will be to provide an online experience that converts well – but a little can go a long way. Present a lifestyle – not just a soulless product Imagine this: a potential customer is looking for a new pair of shoes – something casual, modern-looking and a purchase that is more of a treat than a necessity – an indulgence to get excited about. They find their way to an online shop, find the shoes they want but the images and supporting content are, let’s say, lacking. The (clearly stock) images are relatively small in size, very compressed and coupled with a generic description. In this case, the price point remains high but the presentation is poor – enough to make someone reconsider an indulgent purchase…or perhaps even prompt a visit to a retailer that looks more legitimate. Nathan Fulwood emphasises the importance of having a brand that goes beyond the baselines of static imagery and genuinely communicates passion and prompts new possibilities – “Once you have the basics down, does your brand give a licence to do something interesting – in your imagery, your product descriptions, your testimonials and reviews – that’s going to build a stronger connection and more memorable experience to your shoppers? ASOS are great at this – from featuring a trolled shopper as a model, or men modeling women’s clothing during Pride“. Particularly for an indulgent or aspirational purchase, it’s important to develop on-site messaging in line with a lifestyle – not just flat product content that presents a treat as just another commoditised product. Retailers have scope to communicate passion for their own products, and go beyond flat descriptions – shoppers don’t just buy products for their use value – they buy because of how the products make them feel – about themselves, the lifestyle they aspire towards and wider themes. Be to the point and specific; again, no jargon or industry terms – just plain language that will nonetheless communicate enthusiasm for the brand. To maximise engagement, providing better quality, non-stock images or even videos of actual lifestyle shots showing off the item with other items you sell, with plenty of examples to showcase the product in different environments and lighting will accomplish several things. Not only do such steps help answer immediate questions a buyer may have about how the product will look, but they also need remove uncertainty and communicate enthusiasm. Rather than offering an experience of commoditised products, distinct from one another, you can improve cross- and upsell opportunities while advancing your brand by offering suitable related items via “what other customers also bought” suggestions or curated content with complementary styles and products. Product pages represent an opportunity to tell a story, provide social proof through reviews and commentary and communicate passion for products while answering any lingering questions that might be preventing a purchase. Give new and existing customers alike an objectively great service I feel this is an obvious point, but still today some retailers forget about either type of customer when in fact both are as important as each other. As well as giving a reason for a new customer to make their first purchase, usability is key to earning repeat business from existing and former customers. One thing that fresh potential customers and existing customers appreciate is a clear user experience with no ambiguity about how to find and purchase the items they’re interested in. For new customers, communicating the enthusiasm about your brand and products as discussed earlier is important, but it’s just as important to be transparent about your returns policy, sizing, pricing, delivery costs and more – the practical matters. Beyond your products and pricing, companies can also put up barriers by demanding too much from first-time shoppers. These demands might be something a visitor can put up with for a single purchase, but they’ll implicitly or explicitly make a mental note not to come back. So – make sure every on-page element the visitor sees has a purpose or meaning, remove any surprises from the customer journey and be transparent about costs. Removing barriers in the checkout process and shortening signup/checkout forms by only asking for the information you truly need will build trust, and speed up the path to a purchase. If you do want to ask for data, give shoppers a compelling reason to sign up for an account with deals, personalised products, finance and/or a VIP experience. Making it easy for the customer to navigate and find what they want is key to transforming a new, one-off customer to a repeat visitor. Chris Rourke emphasises that accessibility best practice to support visitors with disabilities should be built into the fundamentals of your design and user journey; “An important part of a companies UX /CX/business strategy (for commercial and legal compliance reasons) is to ensure that the site or app enables people with disabilities to achieve their goals. Ensure that your site developers and designers are complying with best practice (such as the WCAG 2.1 technical guidelines) so that the site can be accessed by the widest possible audience.” By adhering to these standards, brands will very likely be improving the customer experience more generally by prioritising clarity of design and removing unnecessary barriers to conversion. When thinking about the wider customer journey, simplifying product search, top-level navigation the path from click-throughs from email or 3rd party marketing campaigns is key – with testing of different approaches to apply real customer data to make decisions. More than this – if the visitor still doesn’t convert, use other channels to bring them back. A case study by Sales Cycle states that of all abandoned-cart emails, 50% are opened and over a third then go on to make a purchase. The lesson here is to think about conversion rate optimisation as a discipline that starts before a shopper visits your site, and doesn’t end even after they’ve left it and moved on. Simplify search, avoid option paralysis and guide the customer Unfortunately, lots of eCommerce companies fall for this and offer too many options for potential shoppers. Bombarding visitors with competing offers and options can actually have a dramatic and negative effect on conversation rate. The problem here is that with more choice, the greater the demands are on the user to evaluate products. They may then choose the simplest option – the option to leave your site. A powerful tool to tackle this is to add a robust approach to product searches on-site. WebLinc states, that on-site searchers are 216% more likely to convert than regular users and even spend more. So: make things simple and relevant; don’t offer too much in terms of functionality or choice on a single page, and give visitors highly useful opportunities to find their own. Dan Fielding, Business Analyst at St Gobain has the following advice – “Don’t just “set and forget” your on-site product search” One of the easiest ways to increase conversion rate and spend on your eCommerce site is to optimise your on-site product search. Modern eCommerce platforms are equipped with a range of features for managing synonyms, redirecting common searches to custom page, or personalising search results based on customer segmentation. Giving users the tools to navigate effectively is key – and the more of the work you can do for them by applying customer insight and segmentation, the better.” Of course, while there are challenges to having too many products, offering too little can be just as bad. As with many aspects of conversion rate optimisation, it’s a balancing act to attract, engage, sell to and service shoppers in highly competitive markets. One familiar method to guide visitors towards a purchase is the sensitive use of an exit-intent overlay. An exit-intent overlay is essentially a pop-up which, deployed correctly, can offer a subtle incentive to stick around, sign up or make a purchase if users look like they’re going to navigate away from your site. Another aspect is to work on is visual hierarchy. We, humans, tend to organise everything we see and base/judge it all on size, colour, position etc. So – something that is bigger, brighter and at the top of a page will have more importance than something small, dull and at the bottom. Use this to lead users through your pages and choices and grab their attention using headlines and calls-to-action with larger and contrasting elements and also descriptions and features that are smaller. This then allows the user to scan quickly and not be overwhelmed while finding their own way to the products they desire. Ultimately, these are all just methods to give help site visitors to help themselves. Coming back to search functionality, Dan Fielding recommends developing a complete understanding of the tools you have available, but retaining a customer-first mindset with empathy for how they search; “Get to know the tools at your disposal, then regularly review your most commonly searched terms. Repeat the searches as a customer and try to find ways to make the results more effective. Tweaking the on-site search configuration can get you a lot of quick wins, but the real value comes when you bring in others from across your organisation to help solve the problems you find. An effective on-site product search isn’t just a content problem to solve, or a UX or technical one. It’s an area that benefits from collaboration across teams, but get it right and it will pay dividends for a long time.” There are many tools and techniques available to guide visitors, but they have to be intelligently actioned in order to avoid annoyance. At Blueclaw we have a proven toolkit and methodology to keep visitors engaged to maximise conversion rate – get in touch if you’d like to experience this for your brand. Summing up Conversion rate optimisation discussions can often be too focused on software technology and data insights, rather than a blended approach based on rich testing insight, along with more qualitative understanding of brand, audiences and building brand value to deliver results. From defining your brand and audiences through to crafting on-page experiences that match up with their interests intent, through to how you sell to and serve shoppers – there’s a lot that goes into eCommerce conversion rate optimisation. However, that just means that the rewards for the companies who get it right are all the greater. Interested in taking your CRO, SEO and digital experience strategy further? Talk to the Blueclaw team for straightforward tips, industry insight and support today. The post 5 Steps to Maximise Fashion eCommerce Sales – Using CRO, Audience Insight and Competitor Analysis to Boost Conversions appeared first on Blueclaw.

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