#if you don’t like me using queer don’t interact 🙃 i know what i’m about

[villanesus]

Masooooooon 🤗 for the let's get personal I'd love the answers to:

17, 18, 23, 26, 28, 35, 49, 72, and 79

Thank you, beloved Pistachio! This took me a minute 😅 (Send asks, folks! Pistachio has left you all at least 2 questions from that list.)

17: What was the last lie you told?

Gosh, straight for the throat. 😂 Hm. Oh, I know. Replied to a work message saying “sorry I didn’t see this until just now!”  I saw it, I just didn’t want to answer. 🙃

18: Do you believe in karma?

I’d like to (I have a strong sense of justice [an autistic trait]), but I don’t think it’s real. Or at a minimum I don’t think it’s consistent. 

23: How do you vent your anger?

As an adult, I usually just vent to a friend. If I’m super furious I will find a minimally destructive activity like tearing up scrap paper or cardboard boxes. 

26: Are you happy with the person you’ve become?

For the most part. I’ve realized that every few years when I reflect on my younger self I always feel like that person was an ass clown (no matter what age). But I’m starting to cut them some slack. 

28: What’s your biggest “what if”?

I feel like there’s a couple different kinds of what ifs. What if X never, what if Y in the future. 

What if I had a better childhood is one I think about a lot. I experienced Some Things and had an undiagnosed disability. So I wonder how I would have turned out with more support and less baseline terror. 

My forward facing what if is equally a bummer. A lot of my what if energy is spent on what if I end up unhoused? Which is probably a direct consequence of the aforementioned what if. 🫠

35: To you, what is the meaning of life?

I’m not sure there is one. That is to say, I don’t think there is inherent meaning so it is whatever each person makes of it. I mostly try to find small things to enjoy and try not to be an asshole. 

49: Ever had a rumour spread about you?

A few times. My favorite was during undergrad. I was one of the top students in my CS program. The program was almost entirely men and the popular rumor was that I only did well in classes because I was providing sexual favors to the male professors. 🤣 I didn’t look overtly queer at the time, though I’m sure most other gays would have clocked me instantly. It was really infuriating (still is on some level), but if you’ve ever met me you’d immediately find that rumor terribly laughable. Graduated with an award and honors, though. 🙃

72: You are at the doctor’s office and she has just informed you that you have approximately one month to live. a) Do you tell anyone/everyone you are going to die? b) What do you do with your remaining days? c) Would you be afraid?

That’s just a sneaky way of asking three questions, but I’ll allow it. 

a) Probably. I think context and transparency are important and my behavior would change so I wouldn’t want people to worry (about the wrong thing?). 

b) Assuming (unrealistically) that I will be in perfect health until the moment I drop dead, I’d use all my vacation time (why quit when I can force the company to pay for my last month of fun), make an effort to see some friends, ensure my estate stuff is in order and there’s a good home for my dog, maybe finish writing some things, and eat whatever I’d like. If I were going to die a really painful death, I might consider other arrangements to end things in advance. 

c) Not exactly. I dislike pain and loss of independence, so if those are part of the experience then I would be afraid of that. I don’t think anything happens after death other than the electrical and chemical interactions in my body ceasing, in turn causing my conscious mind to cease. For folks around my age and older, I have always pictured it like the way tube televisions used to turn off. The screen goes blank, there’s an odd hum, and you can sense the shift of static electricity dissipating from the machine. 

79: What is the single best decision you have made in your life so far?

I think my career choices. I work in a field I’m really passionate about and it’s afforded me a decent life in the hellscape of late-stage capitalism. I’m stressed out a lot, but if I’m going to be stressed out regardless, at least I can do work that feels meaningful. 

#thank you beloved pistachio #i always love answering these #asks #ask games

[thetaekookcloset]

Probably gonna get hate for this and I’m not even 100% convinced myself that they’re actually in a romantic relationship because obviously we don’t really know shit lol, but if it turned out that they’re just best friends and their relationship is and has always been just purely platonic, I’d definitely accuse them of queer baiting… 🙃

I feel like there’s a line that they’ve crossed with each other and their antics for it to be just two friends being cute and performing. They know that there’s a huge fan base and they see what people talk online and they are constantly adding fuel to the fire themselves by being very touchy touchy with each other (way more so than with any other member tho I’m sure other shippers would highly disagree lol), making comments about each other, mentioning private vacations and everything that is taekook. We see antis commenting that they hate being shipped and it makes them uncomfortable and that one Weverse answer by Tae is some sort of a passage from a bible to them, but obviously we’ve never gotten any actual denial from them as far as I know, they haven’t changed their behaviors at all and that answer the antis keep holding on to for dear life can be interpreted in many ways. But obviously they wouldn’t deny anything if everything is only fanservice, because that would be bad for business and in the end, they are part of a multi billion dollar industry. 🙃

Obviously they don’t owe anyone any answers about their personal lives and in a way they’re definitely not responsible for all the shippers, but then again, I feel like on some level they kinda are because their behavior encourages the fans to keep going. 🫠

Well I'm not going to hate on you, anon, and I would hope that no one else will either, but I disagree with you.  In my opinion, it's not up to us or anyone else to determine what is and is not an appropriate level of touchiness between two people who are friends or otherwise.

I've said it before and I stand by it: calling anything any of the members do "baiting" is too much in my opinion.  It's true that they know shippers exist and some things will always be interpreted through that lens by some people, but it's also true that no matter what they do and how frequently they demonstrate their closeness, there will always be people who see them as uncomfortable with each other.  So why wouldn't they just interact in whatever way that comes naturally to them?  Why should they or would they change the way they act within the boundaries already set for them, just based on how some fans will interpret it? Personally, I obviously feel that the way they act makes it seem likely that they're romantically involved, but as I said earlier, they haven't done anything to make that reading overt and unavoidable.

This isn't a "gay for pay" kind of scenario because none of the members have ever gone that far.  There's also the fact that, regardless of whether any of them are involved with each other specifically, any number of them may not be straight and could still be expressing their platonic bonds in ways that read to some people as queer because they are -- ways that come naturally to them, are genuine, are platonic, and are queer, because queer people have friends and those friendships don't always look the same as friendships between straight people.

As far as getting a denial from them goes, it seems to be policy not to address intra-group relationships (aka shipping) at all. It's not like there have been denials for Sope or Namjin either. I imagine there are a number of reasons for this, first and foremost being that shipping is good for business, and I imagine this would be the policy whether any of these relationships was actually real or not. This is a big part of why I personally have never taken Taehyung's Weverse comment as being against shipping.

I understand your feelings about them potentially baiting the ship specifically, and we really don't know enough for me to tell you there's no way that's the case -- maybe it is for all I know.  For me, though, I'd rather assume better of people until I know otherwise, for one thing.  More than that, whether or not Tae and JK are together, I feel pretty confident in my guess that neither of them are straight, so I personally would feel a lot less comfortable accusing either of them of any kind of baiting, even if it did turn out that they were never involved with each other in particular.

Besides all of that, a lot of their most telling moments have always been the ones just barely caught on camera, or not shown at all and we just hear about them later.  How can I consider it baiting for them to act close on cam if we know that they act close off cam too?  Not to mention the subtlety of a lot (not all, of course) of what they do.  It's hard to consider the subtle stuff baiting, and I feel like there's a lot more of that over the years.  Add to all of that the fact that if they're not literally onstage at the time, there's no real, direct benefit to any of this.  They're just as likely to gather criticism as they are praise, which makes it seem that much more likely to me that whatever interactions they have, at least off stage, they have primarily for their own benefit.

Of course, these are all my opinions.  You're entitled to yours and to your feelings.  I'm not trying to tell you that you can't feel the way you do, only to explain why I personally wouldn't feel that way.  Either way, we're talking about a hypothetical future scenario where we not only find out their relationship status, but also know the details of what it's always been, and it seems unlikely that that will ever happen.

#ask #taekook