#patriarchy and sexism in bad buddy | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

waitmyturtles · 6 months

Text

Turtles Catches Up With Old GMMTV: The Bad Buddy Rewatch Edition, Part 3b -- More on BBS and Asian Cultural Touchpoints

[What’s going on here? After joining Tumblr and discovering Thai BLs through KinnPorsche in 2022, I began watching GMMTV’s new offerings -- and realized that I had a lot of history to catch up on, to appreciate the more recent works that I was delving into. From tropes to BL frameworks, what we’re watching now hails from somewhere, and I’m learning about Thai BL's history through what I’m calling the Old GMMTV Challenge (OGMMTVC). Starting with recommendations from @absolutebl on their post regarding how GMMTV is correcting for its mistakes with its shows today, I’ve made an expansive list to get me through a condensed history of essential/classic/significant Thai BLs produced by GMMTV and many other BL studios. My watchlist, pasted below, lists what I’ve watched and what’s upcoming, along with the reviews I’ve written so far. Today, I offer the second half of the third (ha!) of five posts on Bad Buddy. I'll look today at themes that myself and fellow Asian fans of Bad Buddy have caught and related to in this wonderful show.]

Here are links to part 1, part 2, and part 3a of the BBS OGMMTVC Meta Series. Today's post is a continuation of part 3a. Part 4 is here.

Yesterday, I began an unwinding about what I am calling the "Asian Cultural Touchpoints" of Bad Buddy -- the Asianness of Bad Buddy that is rooted and coded in the way people interact with each other.

As a quick recap from yesterday: I have been insanely lucky to engage in conversation with a number of legendary Asian BBS stans about the Asianness within Bad Buddy: huge shout-outs and thanks go to @grapejuicegay, @recentadultburnout, @telomeke, @neuroticbookworm, and @lurkingshan (who is not Asian, but has Asian relatives and is well-versed in the nuances of our cultures!). We captured a lengthy list of Asian cultural signposts in Bad Buddy and we've been having great discussion around them, including:

1) saving face, 2) intergenerational/inherited trauma, 3) the unique nature of secret-keeping in Asian cultures/societies, 4) enmeshed family boundaries, 5) setting up children to compete against each other for the sake of familial pride, 6) patriarchy, sexism, and the reversal of sexism among next generations, 7) the inset/assumed roles of family members based on patriarchy and elder respect, 8) assumed community within and external to one's family, usually based on where you live and where you go to school, 9) how one's identity is defined based on patriarchy and individualist vs. collectivist cultures, 10) how various cultures within an Asian nation live peacefully (or not) together (for example, what makes Pat and Pran different by way of Pat's Thai-Chinese heritage vs. Pran's ethnic Thai heritage),

and many more.

I unwound yesterday on the cultural touchpoints of saving face, intergenerational/inherited trauma (partly as a follow-up from my very first thesis on Bad Buddy), and the singular nature of secret-keeping in Asian cultures.

There's no way I can get through this entire list in two posts, but I do want to touch upon competition, enmeshed family (and friend, sometimes) boundaries, and patriarchy and sexism as three other cultural touchpoints that engendered quite a bit of conversation among our BBS mini-village.

Competition: ALL OVER BAD BUDDY. All over it, and we know it, and for the most part, we love Pran's and Pat's little love battles. Pat and Pran are constantly competing. Pat gets Chief Phupha into it in Our Skyy 2, dang it ("I'm Pha Pun Dao's top-notch," Phupha, psh). We don't know if the guys can function without having a competition going between them at any given point.

We know this structure started with their parents. As I talked about yesterday, considering the trauma that Ming and Dissaya faced in their young lives -- the trauma that they passed down to Pat and Pran, the rivalry and almost unbridled hatred that they expected Pat and Pran to embody -- all of that emanated through competition between the guys. Their parents asked them, daily, how the other kid was doing in school, making sure that their son was winning on top. As we know from Pat's rooftop monologue in episode 5, that was baggage he carried with him his entire life.

So many of these cultural touchpoints can be connected to the idea of saving face, as I wrote about yesterday. It is an overarching rule of any Asian child's life that Asian parents demand to be able to brag about their kids. Give me an Asian kid whose parents didn't do that to them, and I'll give that kid a huge hug, a gold medal, and a wish in an envelope that I could have had their childhood. Awards, top grades, top class positions, top university admissions: the need to be the best is neverending, for the sake of a parent not losing face for their child not succeeded at the top level of everything.

@telomeke notes the inherent cultural demands of Pran's and Pat's family in the competition paradigm that Pat outlines above.

[Re: Ming and Dissaya]: [E]very time [the children] do well, the bar often gets pushed a little higher. We actually see Ming doing this to Pat in Ep.1 ... when Pat tells him he was made class president. Ming says something like "get yourself a gold medal for rugby and then I'll let you brag"; Pat's achievement (though not dismissed) is downplayed rather than celebrated, and another goal is set. Anyway, my read is that both the boys had caliber to start with; it's natural to Pran (we don't see Dissaya really pushing him to excel), and I think he pushes himself to excel, to be the virtuous paragon of everything, as a barrier to the outside world, and to protect his vulnerable, secret interior. ... And Pat was pushed by Ming to match Pran's achievements, though not for the usual Asian parent reasons – it was to continue his own efforts to best Dissaya, IMO...

What @telomeke outlines here correlates perfectly with my own experiences of my Asian childhood: that even in the face of successes that my parents demanded, the reward was only a passive comment that I had to be doing more. There was never a moment where a parent's cup of happiness was truly filled from the child's perspective.

However, in the case of Pran and Pat specifically: @grapejuicegay had a further illumination that highlighted the utter pain and sadness of the outcomes and consequences of their lifelong competition. We know they were perfectly paired as a couple in love. But ultimately? Because of the pressures they faced as children vis à vis each other -- they also become the only people who could compete with each other. AND, because of that reality -- a new kind of empathy sprung up between them, what I called in part 1 of this series a radical empathy of a kind we don't always see between enemies to lovers. @grapejuicegay's thoughts:

I'm just thinking about the first family interactions we see for Pat and Pran and how Dissaya is framed as a concerned parent with her main worry being Pran taking on too much on his plate with being the head of the department. But also how that's so far removed from what her influence had made of him - an overachiever to the highest degree. ...[T]he whole point of Pat and Pran is that they're evenly matched in everything (which works so well because they're both such EXTRA little shits with so many lil' interests), and it's been there since the [original] trailer. They both keep competing to see who can get the most achievements to brag about, eventually settling down to a point where they help each other out because they're each other's only worthy competition because they're the only ones who can keep up with each other [emphasis mine]. So.... Dissaya's concern is nice and all, but she created this monster who not only can handle having so many responsibilities, but ENJOYS it. And Pat's help is always pushing him to do all of it, just have some help along the way so he's not doing it all alone. Wai helps, but he has to be manipulated into it. So the only person ACTIVELY helping Pran even when neither of them thinks he needs it is Pat ("I know you can do it, but I want to do it for you").

I was tremendously moved when @grapejuicegay shared her read with me on this, because not only did it land fully with me -- but it served to highlight the sadness and loneliness that existed in the gulf between Pran and Pat prior to their union. In other words, because they knew, so well, HOW to compete with each other -- if they needed help, they were the only ones who knew HOW to help each other. Pat showing up at the dilapidated bus station; Pran showing up at the empty auditorium. They could vibe when each other needed a little push. They knew WHEN and HOW to help each other, with the fluency they had ABOUT each other, even before their relationship began -- because they had been competing all their lives. As Pat said in Our Skyy 2: "we've been neighbors all our lives." They knew each other's ins and outs better than even their families did.

The competition that Pran and Pat engaged in had significant cultural roots. But the long-term impact of that competition? It rendered the guys on their own lonely island, a place where only the two of them could understand each other fully. It's a romantic conclusion -- to know your partner so well like that, it can fill your heart with nostalgic reckoning. But as Pat said above and to his father -- it was a bruising path, for the both of the guys.

There's a lot to enmeshed boundaries in Bad Buddy. The boundaries that SHOULD exist between two people that regularly get crossed. I definitely want to acknowledge, before I unwind on these boundaries, that Western vs. Asian viewers will have different expectations of exactly what enmeshment looks like and what it means. I'll have more on this in a bit.

When I think of enmeshed boundaries in Bad Buddy, I think of Dissaya having almost total control over Pran's physical placement. Of Ming knocking on Pat's dorm door, unannounced. Of Pat's expectation that Pa would do his laundry (which will speak to the sexism I'll talk about in a bit). @neuroticbookworm noted how hilariously Asian it was that Pat and Pa -- older brother and younger sister -- literally shared a dorm room. Pat could scuttle to Pran's solo room, to their love nest, to leave their shared room alone for Pa and Ink. But: what an Asian set-up, to have big bro sleeping on the floor, while little sister got the bed.

But besides what Western viewers might traditionally think of as "unhealthy" enmeshed boundaries, there's also a conversation about how Asian families engage -- or, don't engage -- with expectations of privacy. The biggest and most obvious example of a violation of personal privacy in BBS is that Pran's and Pat's parents forbid their children from having friendship with the kid next door. We know, in the end, that the parents cannot control that behavior of their kids, and yet, the parents try to do so anyway, with traumatic results.

@telomeke talked in our mini-village about the everyday functionality of Asian families crossing borders of assumed privacy. These are crossings that I fully relate to: for instance, I wasn't allowed to lock my bedroom door very often when I was growing up, to allow for complete access to my "private space," even and especially while I was in it.

I remember this as a thing growing up, that it's perfectly fine in [Asian countries] to drop in unannounced when it's family (though I think with widespread cellphone availability, people do check in beforehand now – however it could also be just to make sure there's someone in to receive them when they drop by!). It's a bit of a truism that the more traditional Asian parents will be in every part of your life and may not always know how to give you more distance when you grow older. ... For the more traditionally-minded, I think this phenomenon would be even more pronounced. And we definitely see this with Pat and Pa too.

The stories I heard about parents busting in on their Asian kids in compromising positions because the kids HAD to leave the doors unlocked? Stories about full-grown adults being interrupted in their intimacy because their parents came into the house? Countless stories. Us as Asians -- we might laugh about it, but there's also an unspoken and inherent sense of annoyance, of fear, of "how do I explain this now?" that's like a dull, permanent foreboding.

In thinking about how these boundary-crossings were inherited vis à vis Pat and Pran, into the next generation, of course -- all we have to think about are the many, many times we saw Pat crossing into Pran's threshold at Tinidee. That shot of Pat wrapped in his comforter as he shuffles to Pran's door.

However, @grapejuicegay flagged for me an utterly legendary Bad Buddy meta post written by @transpat now nearly two years ago, describing the Indian concept of haq, a concept I know very dearly well. To quote @transpat on the definition of haq:

in context of relationships, we use it to describe the entitlement ppl we keep close are allowed over us. in our culture, with every bond we form and built, we owe those ppl certain rights over us. like our filial duty to our parents, supporting our siblings and relatives emotionally and/or financially, the loyalty to our friends. lovers and spouses are ppl given all the rights of a family member by choice and obv other stuff like touching u in ways others can't, sharing worries and secrets you wouldn't indulge others w, the permission to carry and lighten ur burdens.

We know so well that Pat didn't just cross the hallway of Tinidee; he climbed through and over windows, over roofs, to get to Pran. And Pran... let him in. We know now what Pran's feelings were all that time, at least from 10th grade to university. Of course, Pran would let Pat in, because he had already let Pat into his heart. Maybe not into his psychological safety zone -- that had to take much longer. But in a much more primal sense, Pran had let Pat in, for so many reasons beautifully illustrated by @transpat in their piece, and for the examples up above, especially by way of the inadvertent closeness they achieved through their never-ending competing with each other.

I want to take a quick moment to highlight the two concepts I bolded above in @transpat's description of haq. I don't know if I have the words to describe this as well as @transpat, but to the point of entitlement and having rights over someone... there's a certain sense in Asian group dynamics, that one's business is everyone's business, if that makes sense. Think about cliques when you were growing up. Those cliques were formed on similar desires and interests -- being rich, beautiful, "cool," etc.

I feel like Asian group dynamics go a bit beyond this. Because you are in a group, it must go that any one single person's business is everyone's business. There is an entitlement to information about other people. In the States, we value individualism, and when these cliques are being formed in our youthful years, there's certainly a clash with people wanting to express themselves as individuals; very often, the group dynamics do not allow for individual expression. I would argue that that's even more strong in Asian circles.

If I could describe what I think was happening when Pat was climbing into Pran's window to, say, make that first deal about getting Wai to apologize -- I do very much believe that Pat felt it was his intimate right to go into Pran's room, as it had been established that they were, once more, schoolmates and neighbors, now that Pran was back in his family home. If Pran filled those roles -- schoolmate, neighbor -- it automatically clicked into Pat's social expectations that Pran was there to be talked to and engaged with, no matter if Pran would try to push him out. We know that Pran would give up on pushing Pat out, because Pran had feelings for Pat. BUT: what I love about @transpat's INCREDIBLE meditation is that Pat also clicked into unspoken social roles that allowed him to seek out a moment of friendly intimacy with Pran. (Besides the fact that it's more theorized now that Pat had unknown attraction for Pran during high school -- but I don't think attraction was what brought Pat into Pran's room to discuss that very first deal.)

I think this meditation on enmeshed boundaries, as I mentioned earlier, feeds nicely into the final points I want to make about the last cultural touchpoint for analysis, that of patriarchy and sexism in Asian families.

The BBS mini-village sliced and diced the incredibly overarching examples of patriarchy in this story, as emanating mostly from Ming: Ming's role as the head of the family and doling out roles; Ming ensuring that Pat would "not forget" Ming's reputation at university; Ming's parents doing nothing to interfere with Pa's role as serving Pat; Pat reinforcing that role to Pa in the family home.

Why Ming? As @telomeke broke it down for us: Ming is the head of the household of a Thai-Chinese family. It's not to say that patriarchy and sexism don't exist in ethnic Thai families -- but a patriarchal dynamic isn't shown in Pran's house, as Dissaya is the one who holds the emotional control over the Siridechawats. It's in the Jindapat household that we see old-fashioned roles of men and women doled out.

In traditional Chinese society (before the Communists came to power in China), sons had absolute pride of place in Chinese families, and we see Ming giving special treatment to Pat, while Pa was made to clean up after Mr. Jindapat Jr, doing his laundry, having the piece of chicken she wanted stolen by him in Ep.1, etc... Ming invited Pat home for a meal in Ep. 7, but didn't mention Pa, and Pat had to say he'd bring her along. But Pat and Pa, away from home didn't care for any of this, (e.g., when they were kids Pat let Pa win the bicycle race and skip washing up duties, in the Ep.1 flashback), and while Pa would begrudgingly do Pat's laundry, she would give as good as she got as well whenever they tussled (verbally).

As @telomeke says above, we see Pat, within his generation, to Pa, in their own private space of bicycling outside or moving into his own dorm room, quietly dismantling that patriarchy and sexism of Ming's and Pat's mom -- letting Pa win the bicycle race; talking out of earshot of their parents about Pat protecting, instead of hurting, Pran. [Another great example, a little outside of the patriarchal example but still worth noting, is Wai's role, as a stand-in for Dissaya, sticking to the definitions of the role of Pran's best friend, but showing -- within the cohort of his own generation -- that he CAN change to accept Pat in Pran's life, as opposed to Dissaya's inability to do so (scroll down through the whole liveblog post for the commentary!).]

@telomeke mentioned in our conversation about patriarchy and sexism that he was surprised that he'd see a parent as young as Ming -- a parent to a student of Pat's age, much younger than myself and @telomeke -- keep up with these traditional, old-fashioned values. I think that's a great point, especially in the way that Ming ignores Pa only until the end of the series, when he's instead cut Pat mostly out of his caring reach for disobeying him. We know from the Soonvijarn analysis and reaction videos by Aof Noppharnach and his collegial community of filmmakers, that Aof took inspiration for Ming stealing the scholarship from Dissaya from a real-life occurrence of the same story. I think Aof intentionally had such strong patriarchal structures in Bad Buddy vis à vis the Jindapats in order to highlight what a stronghold old-fashioned notions of life have on generations -- and intended to have a conversation vis à vis Pat, Pran, Pa, and Wai, that the ways in which these old-fashioned notions are updated over time, is through the work of the subsequent generations of children growing up and learning and knowing better.

The coded Asianness of Bad Buddy... god. I could sit with my fellow Asians and talk about the coded Asianness of Bad Buddy for at least weeks, if not maybe even a year or two. We could laugh about the comedy of many of the experiences or traumas we have faced vis à vis the cultural touchpoints that I've listed and analyzed, and we could also share our shared pain, our shared joys, our shared ways in which we express emotion, love, our highs and lows, through our shared Asian cultures. Talking about this makes me tremendously glad that there's national and international fandoms watching Asian shows -- even if, say, Western viewers can't exactly pinpoint what's happening by way of a culturally contextual moment in Bad Buddy, at least there's a community of Asian bloggers out here that can unwind what might be confusing.

Once more, I want to thank @recentadultburnout, @grapejuicegay, @telomeke, @neuroticbookworm, and @lurkingshan for engaging me in such amazing and extensive conversation about the best show ever Bad Buddy. More than education -- the process was INCREDIBLY fun and rewarding.

(Tagging @dribs-and-drabbles, @solitaryandwandering, and @wen-kexing-apologist by request! If you'd like to be tagged in this series, please let me know!)

[WHEW! SEVENTH INNING STRETCH, FRIENDS, stand up and stretch yer arms as I crack my knuckles one more time for this fabulous show! My last post for the BBS OGMMTVC Series -- a breakdown of my theorized reasons and timing regarding Pran leaving for Singapore -- drops next week. Stay tuned!

And after this, I take the tiniest break from the OGMMTVC to review one of the most important shows of 2023: La Pluie. And then I'm back on my tip with Secret Crush On You and an end-of-the-year rewatch of KinnPorsche. So, much more to come!

Here's the status of the Old GMMTV Challenge watchlist. Tumblr's web editor loves to jack with this list, so please head to this link for the very latest updates!

1) The Love of Siam (2007) (movie) (review here) 2) My Bromance (2014) (movie) (review here) 3) Love Sick and Love Sick 2 (2014 and 2015) (review here) 4) Gay OK Bangkok Season 1 (2016) (a non-BL queer series directed by Jojo Tichakorn and written by Aof Noppharnach) (review here) 5) Make It Right (2016) (review here) 6) SOTUS (2016-2017) (review here) 7) Gay OK Bangkok Season 2 (2017) (a non-BL queer series directed by Jojo Tichakorn and written by Aof Noppharnach) (review here) 8) Make It Right 2 (2017) (review here) 9) Together With Me (2017) (review here) 10) SOTUS S/Our Skyy x SOTUS (2017-2018) (review here) 11) Love By Chance (2018) (review here) 12) Kiss Me Again: PeteKao cuts (2018) (no review) 13) He’s Coming To Me (2019) (review here) 14) Dark Blue Kiss (2019) and Our Skyy x Kiss Me Again (2018) (review here) 15) TharnType (2019-2020) (review here) 16) Senior Secret Love: Puppy Honey (OffGun BL cuts) (2016 and 2017) (no review) 17) Theory of Love (2019) (review here) 18) 3 Will Be Free (2019) (a non-BL and an important harbinger of things to come in 2019 and beyond re: Jojo Tichakorn pushing queer content in non-BLs) (review here) 19) Dew the Movie (2019) (review here) 20) Until We Meet Again (2019-2020) (review here) (and notes on my UWMA rewatch here) 21) 2gether (2020) and Still 2gether (2020) (review here) 22) I Told Sunset About You (2020) (review here) 23) YYY (2020, out of chronological order) (review here) 24) Manner of Death (2020-2021) (not a true BL, but a MaxTul queer/gay romance set within a genre-based show that likely influenced Not Me and KinnPorsche) (review here) 25) A Tale of Thousand Stars (2021) (review here) 26) A Tale of Thousand Stars (2021) OGMMTVC Fastest Rewatch Known To Humankind For The Sake Of Rewatching Our Skyy 2 x BBS x ATOTS (re-review here) 27) Lovely Writer (2021) (review here) 28) Last Twilight in Phuket (2021) (the mini-special before IPYTM) (review here) 29) I Promised You the Moon (2021) (review here) 30) Not Me (2021-2022) (review here) 31) Bad Buddy (2021-2022) (thesis here) 32) 55:15 Never Too Late (2021-2022) (not a BL, but a GMMTV drama that features a macro BL storyline about shipper culture and the BL industry) (review here) 33) Bad Buddy (2021-2022) and Our Skyy 2 x BBS x ATOTS (2023) OGMMTVC Rewatch (The BBS OGMMTVC Meta Series is ongoing: preamble here, part 1 here, part 2 here, more reviews to come) 34) Secret Crush On You (2022) (on pause for La Pluie) 35) KinnPorsche (2022) (tag here) 36) KinnPorsche (2022) OGMMTVC Fastest Rewatch Known To Humankind For the Sake of Re-Analyzing the KP Cultural Zeitgeist 37) The Eclipse (2022) (tag here) 38) GAP (2022-2023) (Thailand’s first GL) 39) My School President (2022-2023) and Our Skyy 2 x My School President (2023) 40) Moonlight Chicken (2023) (tag here) 41) Bed Friend (2023) (tag here) 42) Be My Favorite (2023) (tag here) 43) Wedding Plan (2023) 44) Only Friends (2023) (tag here)]

49 notes · View notes

boreal-sea · 10 months

Note

Lol' look at the state of the trans community/movement. Who is centered, who are the main leaders of the trans movement? Transfems. Who has more authority/power/dominance over the intra-community discourse (and not only)? Transfems. They have more power even if they aren't numerically dominant and other transmascs contribute to advance their interests while putting aside theirs (after all, it is the consequence of being in a subordinate position). And how is this power used? To advance transfem interests, ignore transmasc-oppression and position us as oppressors who take up too much space and therefore need to be silenced (active erasure)

It's almost the same dynamic that occurred in the gay movement. Gay men were centered, they controlled the direction of the movement, the intra-community discourse and used that power to maintain lesbian erasure. The intra-community sexism was so bad that some lesbians broke away from them to create their own lesbian-centric organizations (which is how lesbian feminism emerged, by the way)

Like, i'm transmasc myself, always denied this phenomenon bc it was more mentally comfortable for me to plug my ears and close my eyes to the situation until recently. But the transmasc hostility, the zero effort to even acknowledge our oppression, let alone counter it, the general refusal to let ourselves develop our own terms, theories to address our oppression, is what has kept me away from trans communities.

Lol how tasty is the radfem boot you're sucking on? I'm sorry, but the radfems aren't going to actually stop being transphobic to you just because you regurgitate their views. They'll kick you while you're down and coax you into detransitioning.

Like, either you are completely unaware that everything you're saying is radfem, bioessentialist bullshit, OR, you're just trying hide the fact that this is what it is.

Surprise! Being transmasc does not immunize you from being transmisogynistic and it doesn't insulate you from internalizing bigoted, bioessentialist, radfem rhetoric. "Some lesbians broke away" - you mean the lesbian separatist movements of the 1960's? Spearheaded by political lesbians? Who were also part of the founding of radical feminism? Yeah, I know the history of radical feminism, buddy.

Let's look at some actual facts:

Transfemmes absolutely have hypervisibility in both the trans community and in public discourse. That's because of anti-male sexism - which the patriarchy FULLY endorses. Being afraid of males and people assigned male at birth is fully in line with what the patriarchy wants. Funnily enough, radfems want this, too. The idea of a "scary man in a dress raping your daughters" is a very evocative image that stirs up a lot of emotions. Trans women have been depicted as monsters in media for decades. Republicans and conservatives AND RADFEMS use this messaging to make people afraid of transfemmes.

You're not a fucking revolutionary for believing anti-male propaganda! You're a stooge, a puppet!

#transmisogyny #anti radical feminism #intersectional feminism #transmasc feminism

9 notes · View notes

riusugoi · 6 years

Text

JESSE MCCARTHY Notes on Trap A world where everything is always dripping

https://nplusonemag.com/issue-32/essays/notes-on-trap/ A SOCIAL LIFE STRICTLY ORGANIZED around encounters facilitated by the transactional service economy is almost by definition emotionally vacant. 8.

TRAP IS THE ONLY MUSIC that sounds like what living in contemporary America feels like. It is the soundtrack of the dissocialized subject that neoliberalism made. It is the funeral music that the Reagan revolution deserves.

THE MUSICAL SIGNATURE embedded in trap is that of the marching band. The foundation can be thought of, in fact, as the digital capture and looping of the percussive patterns of the drum line. The hi-hats in double or triple time are distinctly martial, they snap you to attention, locking in a rigid background grid to be filled in with the dominant usually iterated instrumental, sometimes a synth chord, or a flute, a tone parallel that floats over the field. In this it forms a continuum with the deepest roots of black music in America, going back to the colonial era and the Revolutionary War, when black men, typically prohibited from bearing arms, were brought into military ranks as trumpet, fife, and drum players. In the aftermath of the War of 1812, all-black brass bands spread rapidly, especially in cities with large free black populations like New Orleans, Philadelphia, and New York. During the Civil War, marching bands would aid in the recruitment of blacks to the Union. At Port Royal in the Sea Islands, during the Union Army occupation, newly freed slaves immediately took to “drilling” together in the evenings in public squares, men, women, and children mimicking martial exercises while combining them with song and dance — getting in formation. The popularity of marching and drilling was incorporated into black funerary practice, nowhere more impressively than in New Orleans, where figures like Buddy Bolden, Louis Armstrong, and Sidney Bechet would first encounter the sounds of rhythm and trumpet, joy and sorrow going by in the streets of Storyville. This special relationship, including its sub rosa relation to military organization, persists in the enthusiasm of black marching bands, especially in the South, where they are a sonic backdrop of enormous proximate importance to the producers of trap, and to its geographic capital, Atlanta.

10.

But closer to home, Traplanta is saddled with too much of the same racial baggage and class exclusion that criminalizes the music in the eyes and ears of many in power. The same pols who disgrace their districts by failing to advocate for economic equity find themselves more offended by crass lyrical content than the crass conditions that inspire it . Meanwhile, systemic ills continue to fester at will. It’s enough to make you wonder who the real trappers are in this town.

— Rodney Carmichael, “Culture Wars”

The pressure of the proliferation of high-powered weapons, the militarization of everyday life, an obvious and pervasive subtext in trap, is also one of the most obvious transformations of American life at the close of the American century: the death of civilian space.

Trap is social music.

TRAP VIDEOS FOR OBVIOUS reasons continue an extended vamp on the visual grammar developed in the rap videos of the Nineties, a grammar that the whole world has learned to read, or misread, producing a strange Esperanto of gesture and cadence intended to signify the position of blackness. In the “lifestyle” videos, the tropes are familiar, establishing shots captured in drone POV: the pool party, the hotel suite, the club, the glistening surfaces of dream cars, the harem women blazoned, jump cuts set to tight-focus Steadicam, the ubiquitous use of slow motion to render banal actions (pouring a drink, entering a room) allegorical, talismanic, the gothic surrealism of instant gratification.

Like David Walker’s graphic pointers in his Appeal, one of the key punctuation marks of this gestural grammar is the trigger finger, pointing into the camera — through the fourth wall — into the consuming eye. The very motion of the arm and finger are perversely inviting and ejecting. You are put on notice, they say. You can get touched.

A preoccupation with depression, mental health, a confused and terrible desire for dissociation: this is a fundamental sensibility shared by a generation.

Among other things, it’s clear there has never been a music this well suited for the rich and bored. This being a great democracy, everyone gets to pretend they, too, are rich and bored when they’re not working, and even sometimes, discreetly, when they are.

19.

IMAGINE A PEOPLE enthralled, gleefully internalizing the world of pure capital flow, of infinite negative freedom (continuously replenished through frictionless browsing), thrilled at the possibilities (in fact necessity) of self-commodification, the value in the network of one’s body, the harvesting of others. Imagine communities saturated in the vocabulary of cynical postrevolutionary blaxploitation, corporate bourgeois triumphalism, and also the devastation of crack, a schizophrenic cultural script in which black success was projected as the corporate mogul status achieved by Oprah or Jay-Z even as an angst-ridden black middle class propped up on predatory credit loans, gutted by the whims of financial speculation and lack of labor protections, slipped backward into the abyss of the prison archipelago where the majority poor remained. Imagine, then, the colonization of space, time, and most importantly cultural capital by the socially mediated system of images called the internet. Imagine finally a vast supply of cheap guns flooding neighborhoods already struggling to stay alive. What would the music of such a convergence sound like?

TRAP IS A FORM OF soft power that takes the resources of the black underclass (raw talent, charisma, endurance, persistence, improvisation, dexterity, adaptability, beauty) and uses them to change the attitudes, behaviors, and preferences of others, usually by making them admit they desire and admire those same things and will pay good money to share vicariously in even a collateral showering from below.

A SOCIAL LIFE STRICTLY ORGANIZED around encounters facilitated by the transactional service economy is almost by definition emotionally vacant.

The grand years of the Obama masque, the glamor and pageantry of Ebony Camelot, is closed. Les jeux sont faits. The echo of black resistance ringing as a choral reminder to hold out is all that stands between a stunned population and raw power, unmasked, wielding its cold hand over all.

The deep patterns of the funeral drill, the bellicose drill, the celebratory drill overlay each other like a sonic cage, a crackling sound like a long steel mesh ensnaring lives, very young lives, that cry out and insist on being heard, insist on telling their story, even as the way they tell it all but ensures the nation’s continued neglect and fundamental contempt for their condition.

TRAP IS INVESTED in a mode of dirty realism. It is likely the only literature that will capture the structure of feeling of the period in which it was produced, and it is certainly the only American literature of any kind that can truly claim to have a popular following across all races and classes. Points of reference are recyclable but relatable, titillating yet boring, trivial and très chic — much like cable television. Sports, movies, comedy, drugs, Scarface, reality TV, food, trash education, bad housing: the fusion core of endless momentum that radiates out from an efficient capitalist order distributing itself across a crumbling and degraded social fabric, all the while reproducing and even amplifying the underlying class, racial, and sexual tensions that are riven through it.

“When young black males labor in the plantation of misogyny and sexism to produce gangsta rap, white supremacist capitalist patriarchy approves the violence and materially rewards them. Far from being an expression of their “manhood,” it is an expression of their own subjugation and humiliation by more powerful, less visible forces of patriarchal gangsterism. They give voice to the brutal, raw anger and rage against women that it is taboo for “civilized” adult men to speak.”

— bell hooks, Outlaw Culture

THE EMO TRAP OF LIL UZI VERT, his very name threading the needle between the cute, the odd, and the angry, might be thought, given his Green Day–punk styling and soft-suburban patina, to be less invested in the kind of misogynistic baiting so common to trap. But this is not the case. Like the unofficial color-line law that says the main video girl in any rap video must be of a lighter skin tone than the rapper she is fawning over, there is a perverse law by which the more one’s identity is susceptible to accusations of “softness” (i.e., lack of street cred), the more one is inclined to compensate by deliberate hyperbolic assertions of one’s dominance over the other sex.

THE QUIRKY PARTICLES coming out of the cultural supercollider of trap prove the unregulated freedom of that space: that in spite of its ferocious and often contradictory claims, nothing is settled about its direction or meaning. The hard-nosed but unabashedly queer presence of Young M.A; the celebratory alt-feminist crunk of Princess Nokia; the quirky punkish R&B inflection in DeJ Loaf; the Bronx bombshell of Cardi B: to say that they are just occupying the space formerly dominated by the boys doesn’t quite cut it. They are completely changing the coordinates and creating models no one dared to foresee. The rise of the female trap star is no longer in question; an entire wave of talent is coming up fast and the skew that they will bring to the sexual and gender politics of popular culture will scramble and recode the norms of an earlier era in ways that could prove explosive in the context of increasingly desperate reactionary and progressive battles for hearts and minds.

The boys are not quite what they were before, either. Bobby Shmurda’s path to “Hot Nigga,” before landing him in prison, landed him on the charts in no small part because of his dance, his fearless self-embrace, and his self-love breaking out in full view of his entire crew. People sometimes forget that for the latter half of the Nineties and the early Aughts, dancing for a “real one” was a nonstarter. Now crews from every high school across the country compete to make viral videos of gorgeous dance routines to accompany the release of a new single. The old heads who grumble about “mumble rap” may not care for dancing, but the suppression of it as a marker of authentic masculinity was the worst thing about an otherwise great era for black music. Its restoration is one of the few universally positive values currently being regifted to the culture by trap.

(sobre Young Thug) The music critic for the Washington Post writes that “if he lived inside a comic book, his speech balloons would be filled with Jackson Pollock splatters,” which is halfway there (why not Basquiat?). Thugger is more exciting than Pollock, who never wore a garment described by Billboard as “geisha couture meets Mortal Kombat’s Raiden” that started a national conversation. Thugger’s work is edgier, riskier, sans white box; if anything it is closer to Warhol in coloration, pop art without the pretension. It is loved, admired, hated, and feared by people who have never and may never set foot in a museum of “modern art.”

THE PROBLEM OF THE overdetermination of blackness by way of its representation in music — its tar baby–like way of standing in for (and being asked to stand in for) any number of roles that seem incongruous and disingenuous to impose upon it — is the central concern of Dear Angel of Death, by the poet Simone White. Her target is the dominantly male tradition in black literary criticism and its reliance on a mode of self-authorization that passes through a cultivated insider’s knowledge of “the Music,” which is generically meant to encompass all forms of black musical expression, but in practice almost always refers to a canonical set of figures in jazz. It’s clear that she’s right, also clear that it’s a case of emperors with no clothes. It may have been obvious, but no one had the courage to say so. Take these notes on trap, for example: they neatly confirm her thesis, and fare no better under her sharp dissection.

Let’s be clear: White’s larger point stands. Looking to trap music to prepare the groundwork for revolution or any emancipatory project is delusional and, moreover, deaf. If we start from the premise that trap is not any of these things, is quite emphatically (pace J. Cole) the final nail in the coffin of the whole project of “conscious” rap, then the question becomes what is it for, what will it make possible. Not necessarily for good or ill, but in the sense of illumination: What does it allow us to see, or to describe, that we haven’t yet made transparent to our own sense of the coming world? For whatever the case may be, the future shape of mass culture will look and feel more like trap than like anything else we can currently point to. In this sense, White is showing us the way forward. By insisting that we abandon any bullshit promise or pseudopolitics, the project of a force that is seeping into the fabric of our mental and social lives will become more precise, more potent as a sensibility for us to try and communicate to ourselves and to others.

34.

TRAP IS WHAT GIORGIO AGAMBEN calls, in The Use of Bodies, “a form-of-life.” As it’s lived, the form-of-life is first and foremost a psychology, a worldview (viz. Fanon) framed by the inscription of the body in space. Where you come from. It never ceases to amaze how relentlessly black artists — completely unlike white artists, who never seem to come from anywhere in their music — assert with extraordinary specificity where they’re from, where they rep, often down to city, zip code, usually neighborhood, sometimes to the block. Boundedness produces genealogy, the authority of a defined experience. But this experience turns out to be ontology. All these blocks, all these hoods, from Oakland to Brooklyn, from Compton to Broward County, are effectively the same: they are the hood, the gutter, the mud, the trap, the slaughterhouse, the underbucket. Trappers, like rappers before them, give coordinates that tell you where they’re coming from in both senses. I’m from this hood, but all hoods are the hood, and so I speak for all, I speak of ontology — a form-of-life.

the force of our vernacular culture formed under slavery is the connection born principally in music, but also in the Word, in all of its manifold uses, that believes in its own power. That self-authorizes and liberates from within. This excessive and exceptional relation is misunderstood, often intentionally. Black culture isn’t “magic” because of some deistic proximity of black people to the universe. Slavers had their cargo dance on deck to keep them limber for the auction block. The magic was born out of a unique historical and material experience in world history, one that no other group of people underwent and survived for so long and in such intimate proximity to the main engines of modernity.

One result of this is that black Americans believe in the power of music, a music without and before instruments, let alone opera houses, music that lives in the kinship of voice with voice, the holler that will raise the dead, the power of the Word, in a way that many other people by and large no longer do — or only when it is confined to the strictly religious realm. Classical European music retained its greatness as long as it retained its connection to the sacred. Now that it’s gone, all that’s left is glassy prettiness; a Bach isn’t possible.

The people who make music out of this form-of-life are the last ones in America to care for tragic art. Next to the black American underclass, the vast majority of contemporary art carries on as sentimental drivel, middlebrow fantasy television, investment baubles for plutocrats, a game of drones.

Coda: What is the ultimate trap statement?

Gucci Mane: “I’m a trappa slash rappa but a full-time G

#notes

2 notes · View notes

jennawynn · 7 years

Text

They Can’t Kill Us All: Ferguson, Baltimore, and a New Era in America’s Racial Justice Movement by Wesley Lowery

Chapter 2: Cleveland: Coming Home

Antonio French. Another name I recall from Twitter. The St. Louis alderman.

I still just... there are no words. That a trained fucking police officer, sworn to protect and serve, just rolls up on a 12 year old kid and shoots him within 2 seconds. Two fucking seconds. That’s not long enough to think about shit. How much of that two seconds was spent pulling his gun from his holster? Releasing the safety? Chambering a round? Or was all that already ready to go and he was just looking for a target?

“A former supervisor, in a November 2012 note, made it clear he would not recommend that Loehmann, the son of a police officer, be given a badge and a gun, going on to say that the officer could not be trusted to follow simple instructions from commanding officers.”

“The talk” that most Black boys are given, keep your hands visible, say yes sir/yes ma’am, move slowly, NEVER RUN. It’s like we teach Black kids to treat cops like wild animals who might attack at any second instead of teaching cops to act with some fucking empathy.

Zimmerman man... so for those of you new to following me, you gotta realize how recently I’ve had my eyes opened. I was one of those “color blind” low-key racist people who never really cared enough to really think about other people’s struggles. Personal failings, moral deficiencies, lack of effort, etc. I was raised Republican. I had a Tea Party twitter account. I voted for Romney, that’s how recent this is. I also sided with Zimmerman. I didn’t bother looking too deep into things. I had my own life to think about. He must have Done Something to deserve being shot. It’s not GZ’s fault for following him or going all vigilante. Sometimes I just can’t believe how ignorant and callous I was when I thought I was just being ‘smart.’

Gingrich uses the term “lynch mob” to describe people after Zimmerman’s head as though they weren’t a tool used to kill Black men for centuries.

The origin of the phrase Black Lives Matter... a facebook status by Alicia Garza, extracted by Patrisse Cullors, and set up on Tumblr and Twitter by Opal Tometi. Who run the world? *queer Black women* all three of them. “As queer Black women, we are often misremembered as contributors and creators of our work, a consequence of deep-seated patriarchy, sexism, and homophobia.” -Cullors.

And these people... like the one who created the Sea of Blue rally... “Are there some things that need to be changed in law enforcement? Maybe. But it’s important that our officers know they have their community’s support.” ffs Mary Jo, it’s not *maybe*. Corruption in the police force is such a common thing practically every cop show on tv talks about it! There’s DEFINITELY things that need to be changed, and saying they need to be changed does not mean you hate every single cop and think they should be killed. You can critique the bad and still understand that they do perform a necessary service to a large society. We don’t need to be putting them on a pedestal where they aren’t held accountable for their actions. We don’t need to be worshiping them for doing their damn jobs.

Take this guy, Michael Brelo... “emptied two separate sixteen-bullet clips and reloaded a third time before leaping onto the hood of the vehicle and firing bullets through the windshield and into Russell’s and Williams’s bodies. Both victims, it turned out, were unarmed. They had never fired the alleged gunshot that prompted the chase. Their car had backfired.” What kind of wanna-be hero bullshit is that? For one thing, go fix your aim, buddy. For another, jumping on the hood of the car?? WHY? 137 bullets fired in all. Brelo was charged, but since they couldn’t prove the bullets that killed them were his, he was let off. What. The. Fuck.

Cleveland is 53% Black, their police force is 25%. And then they ruled that you don’t have to live in the city to be a cop there. Why would you not want your cops to come from the city they serve? The only reason to do that is to limit empathy- that’s what they did in the Navy when you got promoted to Chief. They’d move you to a different command so you could better “command” your subordinates without those pesky old friendships getting in the way. If you want empathetic cops who can show up at a scene and not immediately pull their guns, maybe being neighbors with them would help.

MLK Day 2015 turn this day of reflection into a day of disruption. I attended a rally in 2017 for reclaiming MLK here in Vegas. I hope he’d be proud to still be marching in name if not in body, even if angry that equality is still out of reach.

So many good lines in here.... Having a black president didn’t keep the police from killing Mike Brown. I voted for Barack Obama twice and still got teargassed. A seat at the table isn’t worth much if your fellow diners still refuse to pass you a plate.

The announcement that Tamir Rice’s killer would have no charges came between Thanksgiving and Christmas when the possibility of snow might quell protests... and that’s what happened.

Then the video with Tamir’s sister trying to run to her ‘hurt’ brother being tackled by the cops. Ugh.

Hey... Shaun King. I know that guy. Not like personally, but I follow him on FB and Twitter and newsletter and... wow they really went after him, didn’t they.

and Feminista Jones. Who doesn’t know her?

Sigh... this shit man...

#pbw #wynn reads #wynn reads they can't kill us all #raging about

2 notes · View notes

tessatechaitea · 5 years

Text

Team Titans #13

I'm not saying there should be a version of Let's Make a Deal where awful things happen to people who choose the wrong curtain but I am saying I'd lie to people's faces when I told them I absolutely do not watch it.

I just lost the ability to orgasm.

It's too bad I can't orgasm now that I saw Deathwing's nipples and tongue because the next few panels are of Mirage bending over in her underwear! Sure, she's traumatized and puking from the time Deathwing raped her. But she's in her underwear! If artists didn't want me to masturbate to hot characters in their underwear, they shouldn't draw them so sexy! They should make them obviously horrified and in pain and anguish which probably means concentrating on their face instead of their asses and pudenda. Like the way they drew Deathwing in the above panel. Nobody is going to masturbate over that! Unless they're a gay male into really flamboyant men just barely exposing their rock hard nipples and hiding in showers. They also need to love sharp spikes just over the mouth giving them a thoroughly satisfying blowjob. Just because I was turned off by Deathwing's appearance doesn't mean I can't recognize his blowjob expertise. Donna is concerned that Mirage needs to see a doctor and maybe a therapist because of her traumatic experience. But Battalion, being a rational male who knows the inherent manipulation within all social justice story arcs in super hero comic books is...well wait a second. Isn't social justice the point of all the story arcs?! What the fuck is the point that comicsgaters are trying to get across? "We just want to see people punching each other in tight costumes! I don't want any of that shit where the heroes are trying to make the world a better place! Just stop the robberies and leave the racism and sexism for your feminist romance novels!" scream the comicsgater strawman character I just invented (whom I'm certain isn't actually a strawman at all and pretty close to the mark). Um, anyway, Battalion's reaction comes off a bit cold and patriarchal.

Here's a small hint about the word patriarchal for the anti-feminists: it's not the same as saying men. The majority of mothers in the 70s would probably have had the same reaction as Battalion to their child being sexually assaulted. "Oh dear. It's just boys being boys. Run some water over it and have some ice cream. You'll feel better in a few hours."

Donna, being a social justice Titan, can't let Battalion have the last word. She's all, "She needs to see a doctor! And probably a therapist! And get an AIDS test!" And just like that, it's an after-school special on HIV!

This was in 1993. Is this what Comicsgaters mean when they want to go back to old school comic books? Because if that's their argument, I don't think they have an argument! Although if their argument is that this kind of thing ruins the comic book, they obviously haven't read the rest of the comic book. This might be the best bit!

So the conversation about whether or not Mirage should see a doctor and a therapist after being sexually assaulted ends with Battalion declaring he doesn't want to talk about it anymore. Why isn't this guy the poster child for the Comicsgate movement? Ugh! Enough about those creeps. I'll save really discussing them when I reread Cerebus! If you want to see what happens when a guy believes feminism means completely overthrowing the patriarchy and establishing a matriarchy and what he thinks that would look like, you'll love Cerebus! I love a lot about Cerebus but Dave Sim doesn't come across as logical as he believes he is. It seems a large part of his anti-feminist philosophy stems from the fact that he doesn't believe relationships benefit anybody and since he's a cis-hetero man, that means the problem is women. He claims he's not a misogynist but then acts offended (or whatever the "rational" expression of "offended" is (because he's not emotional!)) when somebody calls him one after his conclusion from research on Mothers and Daughters is that women are dull and uninteresting if he doesn't want to fuck them. I mean, a lot of men are dull and uninteresting too but he doesn't see that as a problem because he never wants to fuck men. If a man is interesting and he enjoys being around that man, the man becomes a friend. If it were a woman, that woman would become somebody he wants to fuck. I'm not sure what his thoughts on a woman who he isn't attracted to that's interesting. Maybe he never finds out because he's all, "Ugh! I don't want to fuck that! She sucks!" Also Dave has been celibate for like twenty years or something so, at the very least, he's putting his dick where his mouth is. Oh man that sounded hot. Calendar Man and Clock King break out Chronos to join their catering business. If they wind up just being criminals, I'm going to be severely disappointed. They could really start a fantastic business by combining their powers. Stiff competition? Just go back in time and start your business earlier! Need to provide products by a certain time? Who better than these jerks?! Need additional resources? Travel to the future and borrow against your future earnings! They could be such a success! But I have a feeling they're just going to rob a bank. And then the SJW hits just keep coming! Fucking Team Titans! I'm trying to avoid noticing social justice concerns in comic books the Comicsgaters hold up as the pinnacle of the genre!

"Look! A confederate flag! That just means we'll have lots of southern things to discuss!" says Charlie who is in for a racist shock about what the flag really means, at least in our timeline.

Dressed as women, the Time Buddies pick up Time Commander from an insane asylum.

Aha! This is more like it! Back to the days before male nurses existed!

Later that night, Donna Troy and Terry Long fuck and I finally think, "Writer Jeff Jensen, you've gone too far!" And Jeff Jensen replies (I imagine), "Too far? Wait until you hear Terry's thoughts on the sex!"

I hope the "Mmmmm!" is because of something he found in the fridge and not a memory of what Donna did to his dick.

Team Titans #13 Rating: A few other things happened but does it really matter? I can't actually retain anything else after Terry Long thinking about how wild his sex life is. I know I'm not speaking for anybody else and that this might be a little insensitive but the above panel is more traumatic to me than Mirage being sexually assaulted by Deathwing. I'm not saying it should be more traumatic for everybody! I'm just saying it was for me and nobody can deny me my pain and suffering! On the other hand, it's canon that Calendar Man enjoys wearing bras. So this was a pretty historic issue of DC Comics.

#Team Titans #Teen Titans #DC Comics #Comic Book Reviews

0 notes

waitmyturtles · 6 months

Text

Turtles Catches Up With Old GMMTV: The Bad Buddy Rewatch Edition, Part 3a -- BBS and Asian Cultural Touchpoints

[What’s going on here? After joining Tumblr and discovering Thai BLs through KinnPorsche in 2022, I began watching GMMTV’s new offerings -- and realized that I had a lot of history to catch up on, to appreciate the more recent works that I was delving into. From tropes to BL frameworks, what we’re watching now hails from somewhere, and I’m learning about Thai BL's history through what I’m calling the Old GMMTV Challenge (OGMMTVC). Starting with recommendations from @absolutebl on their post regarding how GMMTV is correcting for its mistakes with its shows today, I’ve made an expansive list to get me through a condensed history of essential/classic/significant Thai BLs produced by GMMTV and many other BL studios. My watchlist, pasted below, lists what I’ve watched and what’s upcoming, along with the reviews I’ve written so far. Today, I offer the first half of the third (ha!) of five posts on Bad Buddy. I'll look today at themes that myself and fellow Asian fans of Bad Buddy have caught and related to in this wonderful show.]

Links to the BBS OGMMTVC Meta Series are here: part 1, part 2, part 3a, part 3b, and part 4

As a lifelong viewer of Asian dramas, and as an Asian-American myself, I know why I'm drawn to Asian dramas. We all have our reasons for belonging to this widespread fandom, whether you're watching queer or het Asian dramas, consuming Asian music, all of it.

What are my reasons? The first and foremost one is relatability. Especially in Asian dramas, I relate to the spoken and unspoken communication of the dramatic characters as they navigate life's highs and lows. I relate to the way Asian dramatic characters engage with their families, their partners, their children, their colleagues, the world and societies around them. I relate to the ways in which societies are drawn and constructed, to the economic and emotional pressures that characters face. As an American -- I don't fully relate to the majority of experiences that white American characters face dramatically, because I'm not a part of the majority. As an Asian? I get almost all of what Asians are going through in dramatic art (save for, say, Korean or Japanese historicals, ha — but I do indeed get Asian patriarchy and sexism).

I'm not queer -- I am a cishet Asian woman -- but what I appreciate about queer Asian media is, very often, the media's tendency to not be shy about the various and intricate ways that discrimination, sexism, trauma (intergenerational, emotional, etc.), and many more social and emotional phenomena interplay in an individual's life.

When I first watched Bad Buddy, I had the strong sense that what I was watching was incredibly relatable to much of my upbringing and life as a young adult, working out issues vis à vis my family and my eventual partner. Bad Buddy, thematically, captured a tremendous amount of the realities of everyday Asian life for young people.

Bad Buddy exists in the GMMTV bubble of No Homophobia (cc @bengiyo and @lurkingshan, as we have spoken about the GMMTV bubble). However, what Bad Buddy didn't shy away from were explorations of many other social/emotional/cultural themes and frameworks of everyday life, from sexism, to youth bias, to boundaries and enmeshment, and many, many more.

I wrote in my first-ever Bad Buddy thesis that the framework of intergenerational trauma was the main theme I identified -- and identified with -- in the show. But, as I was contemplating writing this series of Bad Buddy meta posts, I wanted to know: what did my fellow Asians pick up in this show that they saw, and that they related to? In other words: what makes Bad Buddy particularly special to Asian fans of the show?

So, I did a thing. I gathered together a few BBS Asian stans, like myself, for a lengthy (and still ongoing!) discussion about what we related to in Bad Buddy. I want to thank, from the bottom of my heart, @telomeke, @grapejuicegay, @recentadultburnout, @neuroticbookworm, and @lurkingshan (who's not Asian, but has Asian relatives, and gets us!) for being up for creating a spontaneous mini-village together to talk Bad Buddy and its inherent Asianness.

It sounds redundant to identify Bad Buddy, a show made by Thais and set in Thailand, as an "Asian" or "Thai" show. It's definitely not a show that steps back to take a look at itself and say, "oh hey, this is really 'Thai,' what we're doing here." When I asked @recentadultburnout directly about what they might have identified as uniquely Thai about Bad Buddy, RAB thought about it and said -- maybe Pat's ranak ek (Thai xylophone). Other shows of Aof Noppharnach's, including He's Coming To Me, Moonlight Chicken, and even the start of Last Twilight, highlight many facets of Thai life, from the spiritual to the everyday-cultural (even Gay OK Bangkok does this a bit, too). But Bad Buddy doesn't really go there by way of overt symbolism and/or specifically Thai spiritual/cultural practice.

The Asianness of Bad Buddy is far more inherent. It is rooted and coded in the way people interact with each other.

An overt example occurs in episode 10, when Dissaya confronts Ming in the Jindapat home, and announces that she will reveal Ming's secret, dropping the effort she has made her entire life to "save face" -- her reputation AND Ming's reputation.

During my first Bad Buddy rewatch, I was so moved in fury by this scene that I had to blog about it as if I had never seen it before. There's so much encapsulated in this moment: the pressure that Dissaya has put on herself to keep the embarrassing secret that she lost a scholarship; the effort she made to keep Ming's theft of the scholarship a secret, to save his face, and the secrets she kept from Pran to save her face, and to keep up the façade of rivalry between the Jindapats and the Siridechawats. She was letting a whole hell of a lot loose in this moment, because the eternal pressure of saving face in Asian societies is, frankly, never-ending.

"Saving face" is an incredibly important notion in many Asian collectivist cultures. Saving face is about an individual or a family projecting an image of calm, cool collectedness and success, in order to not make waves within a collectivist society for any reason. If you are not working to seem like you are going with the flow of life, if you're not keeping up with the Joneses, the Kardashians, whoever -- you are not saving face. If you are in poverty, and are projecting an image of poverty, instead of pretending to be more wealthy than you are -- you are not saving your face or your family's face. If you allow yourself to get publicly defeated -- you are not saving face. Dissaya gave up a lot of her hard-earned reputation in the moment she confessed the truth in front of Pat and Pat's mother.

My Asian friends and I can click wordlessly into understanding the pressure of saving face; say that I didn't get good grades in school? I wouldn't be saving my parents' face. This kind of pressure to keep up with particular social dynamics within and external to family, within Asian societies, is a neverending drumbeat of pressure.

Besides saving face, there are many other Asian cultural touchpoints that were contained within Bad Buddy that my fellow Asian BBS stans and I noted. They include:

1) intergenerational/inherited trauma, 2) the unique nature of secret-keeping in Asian cultures/societies, 3) enmeshed family boundaries, 4) setting up children to compete against each other for the sake of familial pride, 5) patriarchy, sexism, and the reversal of sexism among next generations, 6) the inset/assumed roles of family members based on patriarchy and elder respect, 7) Assumed community within and external to one's family, usually based on where you live and where you go to school, 8) How one's identity is defined based on patriarchy and individualist vs. collectivist cultures, 9) How various cultures within an Asian nation live peacefully (or not) together (for example, what makes Pat and Pran different by way of Pat's Thai-Chinese heritage vs. Pran's ethnic Thai heritage),

and many, many more.

It'll be impossible, even over two posts, to analyze all of these cultural touchpoints, but a few of them engendered quite a bit of conversation among the BBS mini-village that I want to highlight. In this post, I'll focus on the continuation of my first BBS thesis on intergenerational/inherited trauma, the nature of secret-keeping in Asian societies, and will return briefly to the touchpoint of saving face.

One of the most devastating scenes for me in Bad Buddy is in my favorite episode, episode 10, when Pat (after he's learned, throughout the episode, of the extent of the lies that his and Pran's family have shared with their children) confronts his father about his father's demands to literally control Pat's emotions, the way in which Pat related to other people -- specifically Pran. Pat sums up a lifetime's worth of control in one sentence.

@telomeke noted in our ongoing group conversation that this notion of inherited trauma vis à vis Ming is particularly present in Asian societies, not just by way of familial expectation that we, as Asians, embody it and "take it" throughout our generations, as Pat realized up above -- but that ALL family members present are responsible for playing their roles within the framework of the inherited trauma. @telomeke noted in particular that exactly what Pat was doing to hate Pran, FOR his father? That was what Ming HAD to do for MING'S dad, when Ming schemed to get the scholarship from Dissaya. AND, Pat's mother, in consoling Pat, had to play the role of explainer -- which, as we know now, Pat ran away from to meet his beloved Pran on the rooftop before running away to the eco-village.

Pat running away from that moment? That was a huge symbol of the breaking of the inherited trauma that was given unto him by his parents both.

(@telomeke has actually written about their theory about how the Jindapats and Siridechawats ended up living next door to each other -- which seems SO STRANGE on the surface, consider Ming's and Dissaya's boiling hatred for each other -- and the theory links nicely within the framework of inherited trauma. Tel theorizes that Ming's father or grandfather may have actually gifted the house to Dissaya's family as a means of apologizing for Ming's deceit. In which case: the presence of the Siridechawats is a reminder, on an everyday basis, of Ming's folly to steal from Dissaya, which may explain why Ming in particular went so hard on Pat to triumph daily over Pran.)

We as a group unwound quite a bit on the nature of secret-keeping in Asian cultures. We know Bad Buddy relies on this cultural touchpoint at the end of the series: Pran and Pat have a full-fledged and committed relationship as a transparent secret, under the noses of Pat's and Pran's parents.

Secret-keeping....oh, man. I could not have lived a fully authentic life in America if I didn't keep a million secrets from my family while I was living out my own independent choices. I actually, literally, could not have gotten married, because the rule of my household was that I wouldn't date. I would just... get engaged. So I'd get engaged through, what, magic? Match-making? No: I'd have to find my partner through my own battle of social and familial conventions, literally against my family, to get to where I wanted to be in life, which was (gasp) married.

@neuroticbookworm illuminated more on this particularly from our shared Indian lens. She wrote,

Keeping your relationship secret from parents is sooooo ridiculously common in India (and I'm sure we can extrapolate to other Asian countries like Thailand). And the justification the children give themselves is always rooted in how they have a "duty" towards their parents, and that they will reveal their relationship after they have fulfilled their duties.

God, I LOVED that NBW brought up "duty" in this conversation. Because! Assumed within the coded language from Asian parents to children, and vice versa, is a sense that children MUST follow the dictates of their parents. 100%, full-stop.

The duties that NBW clarified in this particular conversation specified life demarcations such as "[w]hen I graduate, I'll tell my parents about my partner," and "[w]hen I graduate and get a job and can financially support myself in life, I'll tell my parents about my partner."

What's coded in these statements is a fear that the children will have to reveal to their parents that they were disobedient in the rules their parents set, that no dating shall occur until the time at which the parents rule it's okay. And at least within Indian frameworks, that period of it being "okay" is, more often than not, the period in which arranged matches are examined. Because, yes, that's still the rule in the high majority of Indian culture.

The revelation of that disobedience? That's bad-news bears. It indicates... everything: a lack of loyalty to the family; a lack of understanding the meaning of a child's role to listen to the parents as the parents are elders and therefore are the moral authority of the household; a lack of self-control (which is a huge deal -- that relates to saving face on behalf of the family); a lack of understanding the morals and ethics of saving oneself, in love and sex, before marriage, etc. Even if a family seems fully progressive on the outside, as an Asian, I'm conditioned to question that progressiveness -- as parents may hold different standards of acceptance for their children vs. other young people.

@telomeke expanded on disobedience for us -- connecting it back to the very important notion of "saving face."

I think there's something quite related to secret-keeping, but it's also to do with the ability of Asians, but also human beings in general, of being able to live with duality in life... and secret-keeping is part of it. This also ties in to the East and Southeast Asian preoccupation with the concept of "saving face" [as noted above]. A lot of families are able to live with the knowledge of dirty secrets, unsavory truths, as long as it's not brought into the light and confronted. I'm constantly reminded of this whenever I rewatch BBS Ep. 12 because it's clear both Ming and Dissaya KNOW their sons are in a relationship but it's not overtly admitted. In that way they (and more Ming I suppose) get to "save face" and not have to deal with the truth that their sons are being disobedient, consorting with the enemy, and because it's not in the open -- there is no dishonor brought to the family and to the elders.

God, I love the way Tel put this. That disobedience on the part of Pran and Pat would actually bring dishonor to their families -- because their families have put SO MUCH EFFORT into building their public AND private enmity their entire lives! It affected Chai's relationship with the families as an employee of both families. EVERYONE AT PAT'S AND PRAN'S SCHOOLS knew the guys were the "legendary rivals." And, of course, by being in rival faculties at the same university, the boys could continue this public enmity as well -- keeping up with the roles that were literally assigned to them by their parents.

If the boys disobeyed, they would bring dishonor to their families. Think about that -- and connect that with the heaviness that Pran walked away with after the rooftop kiss in episode 5, AND the weight of Pran's breakdown at the end of episode 10, when Pat assured him that they would run away together.

No matter what a Western viewer (and maybe even Asian viewers, wanting to see a dismantling of these paradigms) would want Pat and Pran to have by way of full openness of their relationships with everyone in their lives (because, in individualistic cultures, that self-driven openness is a given), Pran and Pat themselves knew that that couldn't be their reality vis à vis the social worlds they belonged to. So they kept their relationship a secret, in the end.

The secret that Pran and Pat keep about their relationship is strategic. It's certainly also a stress point: an older Pat asks an older Pran, at the end of episode 12, if he'll ever be able to walk through the front door of the Siridechawat house.

But this is the compromise -- within the larger-scale culture of secret-keeping in Asian societies, AND the private frameworks of the enmity that Dissaya and Ming established between themselves and their families years and years prior -- that will work best for Pat and Pran to preserve the sanctity of their relationship, which I talked about in part 2 of this meta series.

Pran and Pat do not have to publicly appear disobedient to the demands and pressures of their families. They do not have to make their families engage with each other. They do not have to make their families confront the mistakes that their parents made earlier in their lives. They can protect their families from their private and public follies. They can help their families keep and save face. And by doing all that? They can prevent their relationship from being threatened.

I feel this very deeply in my heart as an Asian-American. For the sake of my American spouse, I wanted to protect him from a lot of these pressures, and so I insisted on keeping a lot of our relationship secret from my folks. If I demanded full-blown, public acceptance from my parents? If I brought my "boyfriend" to parties, and introduced him as such with aunties and uncles -- especially if it wasn't indicated that we'd be permanent one day? Damn. No. I'd be embarrassing my folks, with the aunties and uncles saying to my folks, "dang, you can't control your daughter, huh? You let her do what she wants." That would mean my parents would lose face over their ability to control the lives of their children, and that's no bueno in our cultural terms. It would be on ME, as THEIR child, to uphold THEIR ability to save face, as much as its their own work.

Dissaya refers DIRECTLY to Pran doing this FOR HER when, in episode 10, she asks him, "did you forget to save my reputation?" It's brutal, daily work. And Pran goes BACK to keeping secrets in the end, because it would have been impossible, ultimately, for Dissaya to save face, AND for Pran to save Dissaya's reputation/face, if Pran were out with his relationship with Pat, thus proving his disobedience. It would be -- JUST -- better to keep the secret for all those involved.

As this post has gotten long, I'm going to continue talking more about these touchpoints in a second post. I'm driven to talk about this because I think much of the Western fandom might miss what us Asians are reading into shows like Bad Buddy through this coded language and engagement. I very much posit that Bad Buddy -- while it is first and foremost a queer show, made by queer Asians, about queer young men -- is so relatable to so many of us because we've faced similar struggles of survival, and we've faced threats to the sanctity of the love we have for other people by way of needed to fit into the roles set before us by previous generations.

So! With that, thank you for reading, and see you tomorrow, when I focus on competition, enmeshed family boundaries, patriarchy and sexism in Bad Buddy, and more if I can fit it in!

(Tagging @dribs-and-drabbles, @solitaryandwandering, and @wen-kexing-apologist by request! If you'd like to be tagged, please let me know!)

[Alright! Stay tuned for more, many more ruminations from the BBS Asian station tomorrow!

Here's the status of the Old GMMTV Challenge watchlist. Tumblr's web editor loves to jack with this list, so mosey on over to this link for the very latest version!

62 notes · View notes