Star fly
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punk spot and goth sarah stuff 🫰
i also made playlists of the kind of music i think they'd listen to :') you can listen to spot's here. most tracks fall under the hardcore subgenre, but there's also a good amount of ska and pop. generally has a chaotic, garage, and/or dated kind of sound, really wanted the kind of stuff that scratches my brain in a specific, rough way
there's also sarah's playlist, which i'm less confident about because i'm wayyy more immersed in punk subculture and music. but. i tried! some gothic rock, mostly punkabilly and gothabilly. i feel like she'd be into music that has that campy slasher feel, so that's the overall mood i was gunning for
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emerald fennell will get on her zoom and say [posh voice] Nooo no darling the rich people are the worrssstt. You’re supposed to side with the povvo. referring to the 130 minute film she helmed in which a family of prejudiced but loveable aristocrats are murdered and usurped by an upper middle class lunatic
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i’ve been thinking a lot about what is so unique and appealing about 80s robin jay’s moral standing that got completely lost in plot later on. and i think a huge part of it is that in a genre so focused on crime-fighting, his motivations and approach don’t focus on the category of crime at all. in fact, he doesn’t seem to believe in any moral dogma; and it’s not motivated by nihilism, but rather his open-heartedness and relational ethical outlook.
we first meet (post-crisis) jay when he is stealing. when confronted about his actions by bruce he’s confident that he didn’t do anything wrong – he’s not apologetic, he doesn’t seem to think that he has morally failed on any account. later on, when confronted by batman again, jay says that he’s no “crook.” at this point, the reader might assume that jay has no concept of wrong-doing, or that stealing is just not one of the deeds that he considers wrong-doing. yet, later on we see jay so intent on stopping ma gunn and her students, refusing to be implicit in their actions. there are, of course, lots of reasons for which we can assume he was against stealing in this specific instance (an authority figure being involved, the target, the motivations, the school itself being an abusive environment etc.), but what we gather is that jay has an extremely strong sense of justice and is committed to moral duty. that's all typical for characters in superhero comics, isn't it? however, what remains distinctive is that this moral duty is not dictated by any dogma – he trusts his moral instincts. this attitude – his distrust toward power structures, confidence in his moral compass, and situational approach, is something that is maintained throughout his robin run. it is also evident in how he evaluates other people – we never see him condemning his parents, for example, and that includes willis, who was a petty criminal. i think from there arises the potential for a rift between bruce and jay that could be, have jay lived, far more utilised in batman comics than it was within his short robin run.
after all, while bruce’s approach is often called a ‘philosophy of love and care,’ he doesn’t ascribe to the ethics of care [eoc] (as defined in modern scholarship btw) in the same way that jay does. ethics of care ‘deny that morality consists in obedience to a universal law’ and focus on the ideals of caring for other people and non-institutionalized justice. bruce, while obviously caring, is still bound by his belief in the legal system and deontological norms. he is benevolent, but he is also ultimately morally committed to the idea of a legal system and thus frames criminals as failing to meet these moral (legal-adjacent) standards (even when he recognizes it is a result of their circumstances). in other words, he might think that a criminal is a good person despite leading a life of crime. meanwhile, for jay there is no despite; jay doesn't think that engaging in crime says anything about a person's moral personality at all. morality, for him, is more of an emotional practice, grounded in empathy and the question of what he can do for people ‘here and now.’ he doesn’t ascribe to maxims nor utilitarian calculations. for jay, in morality, there’s no place for impartiality that bruce believes in; moral decisions are embedded within a net of interpersonal relationships and social structures that cannot be generalised like the law or even a “moral code” does it. it’s all about responsiveness.
to sum up, jay's moral compass is relative and passionate in a way that doesn't fit batman's philosophy. this is mostly because bruce wants to avoid the sort of arbitrariness that seems to guide eoc. also, both for vigilantism, and jay, eoc poses a challenge in the sense that it doesn't create a certain 'intellectualised' distance from both the victims and the perpetrators; there's no proximity in the judgment; it's emotional.
all of this is of course hardly relevant post-2004. there might be minimal space for accommodating some of it within the canon progression (for example, the fact that eoc typically emphasises the responsibility that comes with pre-existing familial relationships and allows for prioritizing them, as well as the flexibility regarding moral deliberations), but the utilitarian framework and the question of stopping the crime vs controlling the underworld is not something that can be easily reconciled with jay’s previous lack of interest in labeling crime.
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A reactionary comic about rereading a fic that I recently recommended that was way darker than I remembered, lol. I still love it for how they pretty much drive each other crazy, but that word choice and the consent issues... *cringes* At least there are valid warnings beforehand, and the first fic was pretty PG. Sorry. *laughs sheepishly*
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oh lord people cannot write blade they can't they have to be allergic to it or SOMETHING
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"He should be at the-"
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[kicks door down]
Autistic Nishiki whose special interest is fashion and not only considers what's trendy but also looks out for fabrics that aren't a sensory nightmare, however sometimes he will force himself to wear something that isn't comfy for appearance's sake, which leaves him more vulnerable to getting overwhelmed and therefore 'emotional'
Also means he has his collar popped like Kiryu's for sensory reasons too and slutty reasons, which would once again make me correct in saying if he undid his collar in Kiwami he'd be normal again because if I were constantly experiencing sensory discomfort I too would be fucked up and evil.
Cause like here's the thing, autistic Kiryu and Majima headcanons are more obvious (especially the former), whereas Nishiki probably comes off as the most 'normal'; he can likely maintain eye contact and talk to people 'normally' and not like, go off on some random tangent about a special interest or hyperfixation. And then you remember masking is a thing.
And okay, so I actually think it's unfair a lot of fandom considers him a 'crybaby' right, cause he's cried in situations MOST PEOPLE WOULD RIGHTFULLY CRY OVER!
BUT, I can use this to my Autistic Advantage and have this be he actually struggles to regulate his emotions, and considering he's been exposed to the yakuza world since a young age where ANY emotion that isn't 'respectable stoicism' or 'righteous fury and indignation', he's seen as even MORE overly emotional. Hence the need to start masking so early, PLUS having to protect Kiryu who couldn't mask if his life depended on it because he doesn't realise he may HAVE to (speaking from personal experience, Kiryu definitely went his whole life unaware there was anything ""wrong"" with him (for lack of a better word) and had people just like "oh yeah he's just Like That dw bout it" and went on with his life), so Nishiki takes up the mantle of I'm The One Who Knows What We're Doing
Lad's desperate to gain acceptance and will change whatever he has to but people still somehow pick up that Something's Off About Him and so they tend to be disdainful or brush him off. It's easy charisma that can win over hostesses and brief encounters with civillians but can't carry across in the yakuza. Kiwami is him trying his DAMNDEST to act neurotypical even at the cost of his own comfort, and the worst part is it's not working
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as this continues to be relevant yeah idk I just think this whole RiverClan nonsense conflict would have been less annoying for me to read if RiverClan had actually descended into true chaos. a situation like Redscar’s field guide story where several cats try to claim authority. but in this case, it goes beyond just two cats fighting and the clan starts splitting into mini factions supporting one self-appointed candidate or the other. the problem being presented as “we all forgot how to do chores without a teacher permission slip :(” is so weird and lame. give me blood shed eat each other alive so i believe your plight ffs!!!
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This seems to be a reference to Lorentz transformations? The first formula is apparently a derivation, and seems to be the inverse of the time part of the transformation (there's a space part too), for what I've been able to find.
The second formula is Newton's second law.
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Hey Hannah, could we get some headcanons of Hinny in TPFY and AG? I just want to see how they differentiate between the two stories.
it's so funny to me that this time last year i was asking myself this exact question. but i haven't done this little thought experiment for quite a while because pretty quickly the two ginnys solidified into very different versions her and they definitely take up very different headspaces throughout the stories. honestly even in my own planning and perceptions of them.. they are two very separate people. that sounds so weird because in theory they ARE the same character, but at the same time i did have to find some differences to make the fics unique, and for the prose and narration to sound fresh.
with that being said, this is going to be so disorganized and disjointed. i already know half of it isn't going to make sense to anyone but me, but life is nuts, it's where my head's at right now, and i can't change it.
here goes nothing
i guess i can start with how they are similar? in both stories, the seven books are canon. they are a great foundation and framework for me to work in, i know each book like the back of my hand and i really had no desire to try to tweak or change anything in the original text.
HOWEVER, the main difference between the two, is the path from you is not epilogue compliant. and that was born from several questions that haunted me for about a decade before i even had the idea or the inclination to write hp fanfiction. but the main two i wanted to explore and answer were 1) did ginny really know it was harry that walked past her on his way to the forest? i'm pretty sure she did. so how does she react to something like that? how does that fit into their relationship arc and how does him not stopping parallel other things in their relationship? and 2) what happened to her at hogwarts in her 6th year? how did that affect her in the weeks, months, years afterward?
so why do those questions need to be explored and answered in an canon (read: epilogue) divergent setting? mostly because i didn't really like the epilogue (🤷) but also because it seemed like a two birds one stone situation. i needed time and space between 'the end' (chap 1, which really exists as a prologue?) and 'the beginning' (chap 2, which is when we pick up after the time jump). for maximum angst, tension, and storytelling potential.
so in short, tpfy!ginny is defined by her reaction to harry's march to death/faked death, and her reaction to her own experiences (trauma) during the occupied year at hogwarts.
once i had that story/plot idea in mind. i really started to try and shape ginny into a coherent personality. i mean we have the framework, right? we know what she's like at school, we know what her family and what her classmates say about her, and we know how she acts and interacts when she is in scenes with harry. but how does that become a person. i settled on five (ish) defining character traits (which are basically just a textbook enneagram 8)
Ginny is self-reliant and self-confident. she want's to prove her strength and resist any weakness, she wants to be important in the world, she wants to be a decision maker in her own life/situation, and she wants to be in control of those situations.
the main conflict then became, the way tpfy!ginny feels about harry makes her feel out of control, or another way of putting it, is she can't control how she feels about him. it's instinctual, overwhelming, and it scares her a bit because she doesn't feel like she is in control of her decisions when it comes to him. loving him, caring about him, putting his needs before hers, are all things that she does that don't feel like conscious decisions. this is directly at war with her base personality.
which i've got to say, has been so fun to write. i just torture her, i know i do.
moving on
already gone was born from a place of curiosity and literally took on three or even four different forms before it was an amenesia fic. i had spent nearly a year working on the path from you and was trying to find ways to piece harry and ginny back together again in this altered timeline, and one night i was just like.. 'how the fuck did they do this right away??' i really honestly just wanted to figure it out, for my own peace of mind. how did they get back together within a canon (read: epilogue) compliant timeline.
so i started brainstorming, and i wrote a really angsty post-war oneshot for @hinnyfied's birthday and i thought... this might be something. i might have something here.
but then i was like HOW is she different from tpfy!ginny? because she has to be... but she also still has to be ginny!? but for all the wonderful characteristics she possesses, those same traits can be her own worst enemy (which in tpfy they are)
so in already gone, what is the catalyst that sends her down a different path? i decided it was mostly pretty simple... ag!ginny, didn't make the connection, or at least didn't know for sure that harry walked by her on his way into the forest. the rustle she heard was just that, a rustle. i also decided that the events during her 6th year maybe weren't as horrifying(?), trauma inducing (?), specific to just her(?), as they are in tpfy.
but these were all decisions i made when i was just attempting to write a summer '98 a story.
i really didn't settle on the amnesia plot until two or three months later, because as much as i wanted that summer to be an angsty will they/won't they... it just wasn't. harry and ginny took on a completely different relationship arc than what i had planned and it became, not a story of reconciliation, which i so desperately wanted, but a story of mutual dependency, and the idea that home for them isn't a place, but a person. their relationship (and i do mean both of them, this isn't exclusive to just harry) post-war wasn't born out of shared interests, and sense of humor, and similar values, but of a deep understanding that some wounds don't heal, and some grief can't be quantified. but with that understanding, they can still move forward and live with it. as long as they're together.
so then i was a real bitch and i took it away.
whoops.
BUT THEN THE REALLY FUN PART STARTED HAPPENING
because while i like to assume ginny is deeply affected by her experience with the diary, by order of the phoenix she has either buried it so deep in an effort not to process, OR processed it enough that she can hide any lingering thoughts or actions that might still plague her because of it. she is not defined by her trauma. she has outwardly overcome.
she is also in her peak "i am over harry potter" phase.
like c'mon. that's hilarious. because she wakes up married to him.. and she is also thrown back into an (outwardly) well-adjusted mindset. which could possibly (i will neither confirm or deny this at present because spoilers) throw a big wrench into her relationship that is rooted in shared trauma and the understanding of that trauma. cannot stress this enough, already gone harry and ginny were and are co-dependent. but i sort of love that for them?
ANYWAYS
i've rambled enough. i hope this makes at least some sort of sense. and thanks so much for reading both stories!
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Not to beat a dead horse but I NEED to talk about Mako again
I’ve been thinking about this panel again. Because I still can’t get over the last panel. Bolin saying that Mako had “found himself” and Mako’s face being cut off. The cut is just so dramatic? And it’s Mako. The guy who has had a million jobs, from pro bender to cop to bodyguard. Who is remembered by fans as the guy who doesn’t have a personality. The guy who is always defined as Bolin’s brother, or the Avatar’s boyfriend, or Wu’s bodyguard. Who doesn’t have an identity outside of what he is to other people.
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Random Jason Hijinks I either wish would happen someday or find amusing to think about.
Rose and Jason break Eddie out of hell and steal his soul back from Neron. Jaime is dragged along by Rose because he and Eddie were “friends a few reboots ago”. Jason asked Roy who sent him Connor who is suffering™.
Pre-Red Hood Jason and Pre-Green Arrow Connor first meet up back when Jason was part of the All-Caste hunting a demon. It’s a one-shot adventure and the things you have to know are:
a) this is before Jason’s growth spurt so he’s over a head shorter than Connor.
b) Connor isn’t a cape so excuse him for not understanding demons and fucking up hilariously a few times.
c) When Jason tries to kill the demon who is possessing the human, he and Connor fight about it. The fight ends when the demon explodes out of the person like the Pus of Man from Dark Souls 3.
d) Talia is the one who finds and picks up Jason from the adventure (Connor thinks she’s his mom and Jason just didn’t inherit the melanin) and is also the one who gives Connor contact information for Jason because she wants him to have some sort of friend.
e) They never actually learned the other’s name so anytime they’d hear about Red Hood or Green Arrow they literally don’t know it’s that guy they met as teenagers.
Jason decides to actually dust off his mystic training when Dick walks in and Jason gets hit with so many bad vibes he’s genuinely worried something is wrong with Dick.
Jason: “Did they not fix the Brother Blood mind control thing fully? Did Raven miss something? Isn’t Dick friends with a million people? How have they all missed this????”
It ends with bringing Danny Chase back to life and the only person remotely happy about it is Jason and even that’s a stretch.
Rose, why are you part of the Wild Hunt?!!!
What do you mean Biz got taken by the fae?!
Roy, why is this werewolf saying he’s your husband?!
Eddie, why didn’t you tell me you were a prince of hell? What do you mean that one of Trigon’s sons is buried in Gotham?!!! No wait, you still haven’t told me how you’re a prince of hell!
Jason and Talia's road trip where Jason comes to the uncomfortable realization that he views Talia as a mother/aunt figure.
Bonus Artemis suffering Jason’s Mom Has it Going On.
Jason gets a new dog named Ellie and he loves her and Dog very much. What do you mean she’s a Blue Lantern!?
Ellie is short for Elpis and she’s absolutely Hope Corgi.
Roy finds out that he has a whole-ass checking account under one of his aliases that he never knew about. Turns out Jason created it for him years ago and Roy’s actually under W.E. employed as an independent contractor and he’s been making 6 figures for years because Jason never bothered telling anyone that he still owns Wayne R&D.
Jason slowly but surely claims Park Row and the surrounding areas as his territory. It has the unforeseen consequence of magical folk moving into the neighborhood because Gotham is a nightmare to live in normally, Magic Gotham is even worse and the only people who can survive are big hitters like Blood, Zatanna, and Ivy or small fries like the kitchen witch near Leslie’s. Welcome to the big leagues, Jason.
Jason keeps getting mistaken for Jason Blood and it is annoying. One day some demon hunters threw something at Jason and did anyone know Jason used to be in heaven because he sure didn’t and these angel wings are a fucking nightmare.
Rose busts a gut laughing because she somehow became friends with the least demon-y demon Eddie and Jason as an angel.
Jason, Ivy, Sideways, and Impulse (Impulse voice: “Why am I even here?”) vs the Madness Wavelength in Arkham.
Jason kills Joker and finds out that he cannot. Not as in “He doesn’t die” or “There will be a new one” but a secret third option, “The universe literally resets the day every time he’s killed.” Instead of being a tragedy, it becomes a comedy as killing Joker slowly becomes Jason’s go-to when shit goes wrong/killing him is good stress relief. Stephanie discovers what happens because she’s had to write the same essay nine times once. Instead of being horrified they (and then Helena, Tim, Duke, etc.) make killing Joker a gag. The only ones not allowed to kill the Joker are Dick and Bruce because then the universe decides it’s the bad timeline instead of just resetting again.
Tim: *drops his latte on a hot guy and then embarrasses himself in public trying to apologize and becomes a meme.*
Tim: I guess I have to kill Joker now.
Jason and Kory remeeting and wow it’s really awkward that we only got close because of a universe meddler and then you dipped and never contacted me again even though I was a hundred percent serious that you were one of my first friends and are very important to me.
Oh no. Not the talking. Not communication! Kory take mercy on me and just drop me like a bad memory don’t have us open a dialogue where we reconcile all of the bullshit that happened to us and the fact that we did genuinely get close at very low points in our lives and be willing to try and be friends again!
Give! Kory! All! The! Friends! She doesn’t care if you think it’s a bad idea, it's her life!
Gotham Vigilante Tabletop Club (GVTC) featuring Jason, Tim, Stephanie, Duke, Helena, and Harper. They each get a turn as dm and every one of them brings in a different game.
Why is Damian’s friend (Colin) asking me for love advice? I’m a gay disaster ask anyone else please. ??? I guess I can try to help??? Who’s your crush?
It’s Lian and Jason regrets agreeing to help because Roy is going to murder him.
Countdown 2 Electric Boogaloo. Except for this time they were all shoved into the dimension separately and by separate events and there is no danger. It is just a multiversal road trip with the people who vexed you greatly but are slightly grown up now.
Bonus scene includes Jason’s gleeful face when he realizes he understands what all of those words Donna keeps muttering under her breath mean because Artemis was a bro and taught him Themysciran Greek.
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some thoughts regarding joyful (not definitive)
this is more of a personal post about my relationship with this game, but i realized something important a while ago, and it's that, out of the 3 times i've played lisa the joyful, i had never played it again after changing my mind about buddy
yes i disliked her at first im so sorry, i was biased on brad and didnt like others dunking on him GHAGFSGF the first 2 times i played i didnt like buddy a lot, the 3rd time i was starting to take her more seriously but i honestly just replayed for the battles and secrets, didnt even finish it back then.
so i have to say, outside of the new content, replaying joyful felt absolutely necessary for me, after starting to emphatize more with buddy (which ive been doing for like a year and half, still never played again) and not only that but my thoughts on rando. i've been looking wrongly at him since the start becuz i thought he was simply just nice 'rando did nothing wrong' then i realized he, in fact did things wrong, and i had become a bit, hmm, disinterested in him, because i had in mind his flaws too much and it started to feel like he didnt care much about buddy. sorry if this is mean as hell rando fans, but luckily playing again gave me a different view of him. i think rando cares, he cares as much as he can but he cant just agree to everything, there are things that simply just oppose eachother and i think this eats him alive and makes him a little lame in how he handles things. i noticed he mentions the kidnapping at the start quite a lot, which he could be feeling intensely guilty about, even moreso, with the implication that buddy was assaulted, which he even asks her about right after. and even if buddy doesn't bring it up ever again, he seems still worried about this. and i liked paying attention to that. i enjoy not seeing him as perfect but he is still caring
on the topic of buddy, i started to become more and more attached to her over time and it actually pains me to think about her sometimes. much like with lisa, thinking about how they were literally just kids going through the worst makes me cry at times. during this playthrough of joyful i had something strange happen and it's that i'd get actual goosebumps reading some of the dialogue, the things buddy would say to rando, the kidnapping, the flavor text in battles and things the enemies would say to her. i think i finally played joyful like i was supposed to and im happy about that, im rly feeling like drawing buddy and rando now. theyre not perfect siblings but it's good to be assured that they cared about eachother, i needed that
another thing i rly rly needed since a long while ago was to cry for lisa again, i played the brad hallucination fight in spanish (only that part, cuz i wanted to see how the name 'chiqui' got handled) and it made me cry so bad, especially i noticed that right after the dialogue where brad tells buddy to not call him dad, his next phase is literally named 'dad', i never paid attention to that. but anyway it seems this game affects me more if i play in spanish, might be because the first time i played it was the fan translation, very nostalgic. some bits of the new content in painful and joyful made me cry, too, mostly the lisa bits. even if there are some things im not convinced by, i know im thankful for that, idk, i like getting emotional and crying, this game means a lot to me, but for a while i could only cry if at some point i started thinking about it too much, i couldn't cry while playing, so this was nice, im a sensitive and lame guy
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Im so fucking tired of allistic people man...
They always present like 2 choices for you and go on for days about how they understand either choice, they won't judge you no matter what you pick and how they'll be fine regardless then act all disappointed and whiney when you make that choice and they didn't get the answer they wanted.
I'm sorry, how was I supposed to know that was the wrong choice™️. If you wanted me to do something why didn't you say it. I don't care about all your little social shit, be honest with me. I didn't choose based on your wants when I don't know what you want. I made the "selfish" choice despite everyone around me saying they supported my decision and totally understood. Then I'm the bad guy. For making a choice. That I was assured over and over again that I wasn't going to be judged for.... I'm so tired of this... I'm so tired of allistic people setting these fucking landmines for me. Like they enjoy my suffering. I always get fucking burned in these situations. I can either just do what I think they want with varying response or I can be honest and unmask and do what I think is best for me then they all collectively sigh and look away like Im the disappointment...
If it's not truly safe, don't fucking tell me I'm safe. If I truely won't be judged, don't judge me. If I can't safely unmask, don't tell me to be myself and make my own choices. Even allistic people who had no fucking skin in this game judged me. I chose the option that was best for me and now I'm the villain. Again. Fuck allistic people man, fuck those wishy-washy judgey ass people.
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I started typing this whole thing on mobile and couldn't figure out how to put a break in and I refuse to update the app. Fuck it. You are scrolling past this whole damn thing. Unfollow me. This is all I'm gonna be talking about for the next two weeks.
Exo needs to break up. They have needed to break up. That was my hot take I had been saying I'd eventually share but I never got around to it, and now it's a lot more apparent. Not that I thought this was going to happen. I thought that when I finally posted this, someone might be mad about it, but in wake of CBX's lawsuit I don't think anyone's going to be surprised to hear it.
I was sure exo members were done suing SM entertainment a long time ago. It's been 9 years since Kris and Luhan filed their lawsuits, both of whom won. It's been 8 years since Tao's hiatus, and almost 8 since he filed his lawsuit months later, which he ended up losing despite never rejoining exo. I became a fan of exo during Call Me Baby promotions when Tao was still dancing with a broken leg. I was 15 at the time, about to turn 16. EXO scandals were extremely fresh and ongoing. But those three are so far in the past now. Lay quietly decided not to renew recently, but he hadn't been able to appear with the group for 5 years so, yeah. No surprise. But I really thought it was all done when EXO-M was done for.
Well, I can tell you why I'd been thinking for a while EXO should break up. It's because they're really a thing of the past, and essentially after Love Shot, it felt like there was nowhere to go from there.
That felt like the last breath of their 5 year long prime. Don't get me wrong, it was awesome. EXO have hit after hit after hit, think of the absolute best most addictive song by your favorite pop artist, and EXO have a discography of mostly those. But they haven't grown and changed artistically or commercially as a group. They've been around 11 years, they're in their 30s now, and I don't even think most of them have the heart to revitalize their prime like Super Junior did after their military hiatus was over. Maybe a couple of them have it in them to do the pop star thing for their entire careers, but I didn't think that like, Sehun or Chanyeol were necessarily passionate about creating new music for the rest of their career. Chen has a family now and that's also something I'd like the rest of exo to afford without their huge commercial group getting in the way of that. The only one I felt for sure would not be done anytime soon was Baekhyun. I thought he'd be the new Kangta of the group, sticking around when EXO were dormant and fizzled out. I never thought SM would actually let them break up, like H.O.T did when I was a baby. But yeah, Baekhyun leaving shocks me the most. Not that I blame him. I do fully believe the allegations made in the lawsuit as SM have had such a shady reputation.
Looking at SM's pre-EXO boy groups, one might say EXO were the main successor to Super Junior, because, obviously, both groups debuted with 12 people. Large groups like that weren't really a thing in kpop before Super Junior debuted. Additionally, Han Geng of Suju was one of the first Chinese kpop idols. In 2008, two more Chinese members were added to the sub unit Super Junior-M, which released Mandarin versions of pre-existing and original Korean Super Junior songs. Hm, this sounds familiar. I only just built up a better case for the EXO/SJ argument. Diana and I talk about this sometimes though; I once made an argument that I think EXO was more a successor to TVXQ/DBSK (Tong Vfang Xien Qi/Dong Bang Shin Ki), which I would have forgotten saying if she never brought up that one time i said it ever again.
In July of 2009, JYJ threw the first brick at SM Entertainment I mean TVXQ's members Kim "Hero" Jaejoong, Park "Micky" Yoochun and Kim "Xiah" Junsu filed a lawsuit against SM for contract termination, claiming they had been coerced into slave contracts as minors. They were 22-23 at the time, TVXQ having debuted on December 26th, 2003. The three of them won the lawsuit, signed to C-Jes Entertainment and formed the new group, JYJ, of just the three of them. It was assumed the original five piece was dead by that point, but surprisingly, in 2010, Jung "U-Know" Yunho and Shim "Max" Changmin chose to stay at SM and continue TVXQ as a duo.
This whole thing is arguably the most significant scandal in the 30-year history of SM. TVXQ had been SM's biggest success to date and some argue they and Boa still are. Your faves wouldn't have cracked Japan without the efforts of those two, and if kpop didn't reach Japan in the early 2000s, the entertainment industry in a small East Asian country wouldn't have become huge across the entire planet---and frankly, if TVXQ hadn't been big internationally, they'd have been done for because SM had them blacklisted from Korean television for a decade.
Han Geng of Super Junior actually did file for contract termination shortly after JYJ did, also for mistreatment. As did Luhan, Tao and Kris as we've already acknowledged. But all four of them could move to the entertainment industry in China. Sure, you're always going to lose something by leaving as big a group as EXO, Super Junior or TVXQ, but SM hasn't been sued by its Korean idols since JYJ. Baekhyun, Xiumin and Chen know that they're putting at least as much on the line. And now, like TVXQ, more than half of EXO are no longer in the group, and the majority of the run for the both of them has had this cloud of mistreatment over their reputations. They were also both so unstoppably huge and popular.
I was in elementary school for DB5K's prime, and there were fans of kpop in the west but I can't tell you what their success across Asia looked like as someone who wasn't there. But I can tell you, between 2015-2016 when kpop gradually started to become very big, EXO for a time were bringing in more people to kpop than A Particularly Famous Group in the West I Have No Interest in Naming Because I Don't Want Their Fucking Fans Derailing My Post With Unrelated Discourse While I'm Not Even Talking About Them. Just believe me there was a time when EXO were way more popular in the west than Said Band I Decline to Specify, the eclipse that happened was gradual, and to my understanding EXO continued to be the biggest thing in Asia despite that another one eventually cracked America more and I'm not denying that they did. Point is, EXO coming first was important to all of that, because I and several others wouldnt have heard of the one kpop group if EXO didnt get us all into kpop first from 2013-15/16.
That all said now, this was all very much not how I'd wanted EXO to actually end. This is crashing and burning. Much like TVXQ, EXO is not going to be able to have a reunion after this, because they'll never receive SM's blessing to work together. I mean, EXO-M never would. 12 member EXO hardly lasted for two years though and their prime was very new when people started leaving, so to be honest, I don't know if the kids getting into EXO in the 2020s would really care to see Luhan, Tao, and Someone Sitting In Prison Whose Name I've Uttered More Than I'd Like To.
But in a similar vain, while DB5K originally split into two, JYJ are all off in different directions now. Yoochun was fired. Junsu left C-Jes and made his own label. Jaejoong did the same recently. Could you tell I listen TVXQ? But yeah, now that there are more than 3-4 people departed from EXO, they've got former members going in a lot of different directions. Someone already said it but I hope Xiumin follows Luhan back now. Back in my day Xiuhan were so cute.
Also, since I managed not to slip this into the post anywhere.... these guys have been showing up to work. Every damn day they've been showing up to work, that's another reason why it's so shocking. Chen dropped a song days ago and Baekhyun has been doing shows, posting dance practices, EXO have been appearing together for their 11th anniversary and supposed upcoming comeback. Whaaat a slap in the face. I support CBX 100% though and you should too.
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