-Back on the Beat-
Part 2. 03
Kim stares at his phone.
He was cooking dinner when Porchay messaged him, and now his focus is entirely on his phone. He’s trying very hard not to read into the exchange, except Porchay definitely didn’t need his advice on this. A quick Google search would reveal industry standards and freeware recommendations. Porchay has been to Kim’s studio and used Pro Tools when they recorded the song Porchay wrote for him. They even had a whole conversation about it the first time when he was showing him how to use it.
So… why did Porchay message him?
Did he just want an excuse to talk to Kim?
Kim swats the thought away. There’s no point trying to read into it. For all he knows, Porchay completely forgot the name of the programme Kim uses, or maybe he wanted the opinion of someone he knows in the industry and not just strangers online.
Or he was… testing Kim?
Kim sighs towards the ceiling. He needs to get a grip. He decides to take the conversation at face value and focus on the little happy feeling it brought along: this was their first proper exchange since they broke up.
Their first proper conversation, and Porchay left it with a smiley face emoji and a promise to continue the conversation again in the future.
Kim smiles down at his phone.
...
He looks away and sighs. He shouldn’t get his hopes up. It might be something, and they’re definitely making some sort of progress, but that doesn’t mean things are fixed.
Kim wants to repair things between them, and so far what he’s doing seems to be working… somehow.
If he can work them up to proper in person conversations, then maybe they can talk properly about the things that happened and then maybe, if Kim is feeling brave enough, he can ask Porchay out on a proper date.
He looks back down at his phone and purses his lips, contemplating.
Kim grins to himself, looking away towards the window, and then back down at his phone. He bites his lip.
Yeah, things are going pretty well so far.
< Prev - Next >
First
205 notes
·
View notes
Lovelessness and lack of any attraction making me realize that i don't understand any relationships in terms of love.
How do you know you're romantically interested in someone? how is that different than loving them in literally any other way? Hell, how do you know you love your friends? When do you even apply the label of friend? How do you decide you want to be someones friend even? What about family? we're just expected to love them from birth but why? How do you know you view someone as family? why are we expected to love people we just happen to be related to?
I dunno, I'm writing some friendships, found family, and just adopted family and biological family relationships and I'm realizing that I'm struggling with actually like...showing why characters "love" each other in these ways. What makes this character want to be a parental figure to another character? what makes this characters friends any more important than other people in their lives? I'm writing what society tells me but I don't actually think i understand any of it.
I can understand connection and characters enjoying each others company and caring about each other but when it gets to the love part? the part society demands there be for the relationship to be full and real and complete? I find myself lost every single time. shouldn't them caring for each other be enough? why do they need this confusing emotion for them to truely be friends or truely be family?
Why is the label of a "strong bond between people" locked behind the paywall that is the undefined idea of love? Why is love a requirement and not an option for these sorts of bonds? a bond without love doesn't mean you hate the person or dislike them even. it doesn't mean you're apathetic. it just means you don't love them.
I don't get why this word is so important. I don't get why it's expected.
14 notes
·
View notes
So like, I have been having this weird experience analyzing the Harry Potter books lately, and please indulge me while I talk about J.K. Rowling's weird writing.
My goal was simple: read the Harry Potter books to find which parts were influenced/inspired by actual magic that people do in real life. My theory was that there was a lot more magic in the earlier drafts of the books, and that she took a lot out due to fear of backlash from America's ongoing reenactment of the Satanic Panic. For instance it's quite obvious some of their magic lessons got dumbed down so that very little of what's in the books could actually be tried in real life, and I think she took out a lot of astrology.
I also wanted to do a couple errands along the way, one of which was to check and see if it's explicitly written in the books that Harry is a cis man. I'm a trans man, SO I'D KNOW. (I'm a slow reader so all I can say for now is: the FIRST book does not explicitly state Harry is cis, but if he's trans, there's some implied worldbuilding with items like the Sorting Hat that comes into play. Also I'm fairly sure the Dursleys would have gone along with him being trans because that meant Petunia could reuse Dudley's old clothes instead of having to get girl stuff. I'mma save any other explanations on the topic for a video on it.) The reason I'm doing this read-through is because I think J.K. doesn't know anything about trans people and didn't think to make sure her wizard world was trans exclusionary. AND IT TURNS OUT THAT WE TRANS MAGIC USERS HAVE A WAY OF WIGGLING INTO MOST PLACES UNDETECTED BY NORMAL MEANS.
While I was doing the re-read I encountered two sort of broad revelations:
There's a lot of old stuff in there like Latin and Greek and tradcraft stuff, but also modern magic of the more recent era... but the incorporation of modern magic cuts off somewhere before the 80s. These books read like they were written by a early 70s magician. Like they honestly read like J.K. is a magical practicioner who just didn't read any magic books written after 1972 and never discovered what Chaos Magic is, (and also, never heard of most of what happened in the Cold War). I have never found a writer, in fiction or non-fiction, more dedicated to referencing magical stuff that most magicians alive today just don't care about anymore.
J.K. Rowling's knowledge of child abuse laws and general social mores regarding treatment of children also ceased to update itself by about the 80s. I keep getting distracted by this and having to make more side-notes about corporal punishment and researching stuff like when caning was banned in England. (HInt: it was banned before Harry went to school, so in Book 1 it's fuckin weird that he assumes that Wood is the name of a cane he's about to be whipped with.) Like, this woman raised children in the modern era, she should know when canes stopped being used.
So like, when I mention that I'm doing some research in this area, this is the sort of stuff I'm reading for and the sort of stuff I'm encountering. I haven't been talking much about this journey because it seems like any time anyone brings up anything Harry Potter up whatsoever, we've got to talk about how J.K. is a terf in every other sentence. But like, y'all: I hope you slow down and re-read the books, because J.K. Rowling is a terf who is also a child abuse apologist and normalizer. She is a terf who is also a horrible fat-shamer. She is a terf who is also an ableist with a huge problem writing about mental illness. And she's a terf who's also a sexist who undermines feminism with her actual writing of female characters.
And I honestly think she double and triples down on the terf stuff so that people will only talk about that. I think it's worth talking about the fact that not only is she an awful person in the terf way, but like, every other way imaginable too. I think it's worth talking about the fact that with all the obvious biases she has, the group she CHOOSES to publicly marginaiize is trans women, and I think she makes that choice because she thinks that she'll get more allies that way. That if she wore all of her issues on her sleeve like she wears the terfness, that she'd lose a lot of allies, that a lot of prestigious charities would stop having anything to do with her. That she uses the identity of "terf" as a shield because she knows that certain people will protect a terf, and she does this specifically so people won't notice how much of a sexist, abuse apologist, ableist, fatphobe etc she ALSO is. Opinions that could lose her a lot of money and clout if people remember them enough.
She's trying to pick on who she thinks is the most unpopular kid in the class out of the hopes that the bullies in class will be her friends instead of pile up on her, but if the bullies knew what she really thought of them, THEY wouldn't even be her friends.
Also like... I just want someone else to read the actual words in these books and see what fucked-up choices she made as a writer. I think a LOT of people remembering these books are actually remembering the movies, which are way more different from the books than you might expect.
105 notes
·
View notes