mono no aware
I'm feeling kind of maudlin right now.
I’ve been posting my DWJ Rereads up on LiveJournal which as you know is a pretty dead platform (except if you’re an Arashian, I guess.) And because I’m still on LJ, I still get email notifications from them - birthdays and so on. And lately it hit me that there are so many usernames that I don’t even recognise anymore in these notifications. So I decided to do a friends list purge.
I’m a sentimental sort of person, so I mainly just unfriended deleted accounts or people I have no recollection having interacted with. People that I’ve considered friends at some point stayed in the list, even if they haven’t updated their LJs in years. People that have unfriended me elsewhere but not LJ (because they’ve left LJ long before they unfriended me) were removed, of course.
But seeing all those names made me kind of sad, and incredibly lonely, although not in the usual sense of the word, I suppose. It just made me think about how fandom friendships could seem so very strong, but really most of the time you don’t know much about one another and might lose contact forever. There are friends that I used to talk to on a near daily basis, with deactivated accounts. I still think about them a lot, and wish that wherever they are, they are okay.
I’m slowly losing my grip on the Arashi fandom (okay, I have to admit, I stopped holding on to the fandom since December 2015) and since they’re the longest fandom I’ve been in, with the most amount of people I’ve been pretty close to, it feels strange and scary to remember that once these were the people I talked to the moment I wake up, and right before I sleep.
(I was watching Loki episode 2 today, and that moment when he realised that Asgard - and its people - are gone forever, I think I felt that way. It might seem like an exaggeration, and of course these people are just gone, not dead but the Arashi fandom is that large, and there are people in it that felt that close.)
There are still a few people from the fandom that I’m mutuals with on Twitter or Instagram - we might occasionally check up on each other even now, but the distance is there. There is at least a couple that feel like lost connections - we are mutuals now and enjoy each others’ posts, but we didn’t talk that much during our Arashi fandom years and only now we are realising we could have been really good friends then. We could still be that now, but somehow, without Arashi to anchor that relationship, we’re just individuals drifting on a raft, occasionally meeting.
It really isn’t just about Arashi, though. Lately I’ve been picking the Blythe hobby back up again, and it reminded me of all the people I’ve lost from that community. Fandom friends are so transient, and knowing this just about hollows me out. Because even as I leave fandoms I never close these doors permanently - I have a lot of special interests and sometimes I invest on some over the others. I was into the X-Men when I was in primary school. It took me a long time, but I’m into X-Men again now, and am more obsessed than I ever was before. I haven’t thought about my Blythes more than a few hours at a time for the last few years, but right now, every mindless moment on the phone I’m scrolling through Blythe pictures on instagram, or looking for Blythe clothes on Shopee/Carousell. When I love something, it’s permanent. But I understand that it’s not the same for others, and they leave, and most of the time I’m too tired to make new friends, so I do what I do best - go solo, and/or stick to parasocial relationships with podcasters and comic book twitter accounts, instead.
But I miss fandom. The thought of going into another fandom, making new friends that become the most important people in my life for months or years, just for them (or me) to fade into obscurity one day, and we might not even remember each other’s usernames - that’s scary, and I don’t know if I can even do that again. But still. I miss fandom.
Anyway, sorry for being depressing again despite it being effing PRIDE MONTH. The pandemic is really getting to me (and everything about how our govt is handling it, plus the increase in homophobia that happens every June here) and on top of it all, I’m experiencing really bad dysphoria right now. I was just about to say that dysphoria is something that only happens once a month or so for me but now that I think about it, it’s more of a case of it only getting really bad about once a month. I have heavy anxiety as it is, so sometimes I can’t really tell when it’s caused by dysphoria.
So…. let’s get back to happy-making HELLFIRE GALA MONTH subjects.
I recently finished JAY’S GAY AGENDA by Jason June which is a YA contemporary romance and, well, it’s a thing? It’s the sort of book that, had I encountered it as a teen in the 90s, I would’ve glommed it completely, because Jay is such a teenager and also in retrospect a lot of 90s contemporary fiction were pretty shitty. Not that this book is shitty (even in the 90s problematic sense) but, you know. This is 2021, there are more queer YA books being published every year than I can possibly read, so it's maybe not good enough for me personally, an adult reader who is now closer to 40. (Unfortunately for queer fiction in general, my YA reads are still ahead of many of the adult stuff.)
I’m also currently reading MAY THE BEST MAN WIN by Z.R. Ellor which is actually very good (and with much more satisfying teen characters/character dynamics than Jay’s Gay Agenda) but one of the major plus points - that it features a trans male teen and an autistic teen who has to mask all the time as the two POV characters - are also negatives for my current state of mind, because I am both experiencing dysphoria and relating to all the difficulties of having to mask and having people assume I’m lazy/unmotivated/uncaring/etcetc when my brain just functions differently and I still don’t understand why the mere thought of doing things that seem so fucking simple for others can be completely paralysing to me. Uh oh, this doesn’t seem very upbeat, does it? No, really, this book is great, and if I was in a better state of mind right now I’d have finished it in one sitting. As it is, I’m taking lots of long breaks to try to stop from spiralling.
For our Pride Month rewatch, Patricia and I watched EVERYBODY'S TALKING ABOUT JAME which is still one of my favourites with so many good songs and it still hits me like it did the first time I saw it. There's going to be a Hollywood movie version soon. A trailer is already out but, please watch the trailer and then watch the trailer for the West End show and tell me what you think of both.
One thing that I thought when I first saw the musical, and this watch, was that this is how you solve the whole "stereotyping" problem - I'm thinking about shows that whitewash Asian characters (like Falcon + Winter Soldier and Doctor Strange) in order to avoid stereotyping the one Asian character (who was created back when Asians were made as racist stereotypes). What Jamie did was have a hijabi character who is very much the "good Muslim girl" stereotype AND the model minority, but also include another hijabi character who from the first glance you can tell cares more about her appearance, and is into fashion and gossip and dances and boys and seems to be one of the popular girls. That's how it's done - by adding more [insert minority here] rather than erasing them entirely!
Oh! And, I wanted very much to watch Queer Japan (a documentary) the other night, because I was feeling incredibly shitty and needed something to anchor me, but I couldn’t find it either legally or illegally (the legal sites I’ve found were all region-locked and they ignored my VPN) so instead, I watched HANDSOME DEVIL which I happened to find on Netflix. It’s supposed to be a hopeful “it gets better” movie, I think. There’s this scene when Andrew Scott (who plays this awesome teacher) was telling the main character exactly that, but I don’t know, what I felt instead was that this was a beautiful lie that he’s telling his student, because he wanted to believe it for them both. It didn’t seem to get that much better for him. And it made me think about where I am now, and I don’t think teenage me would’ve thought that it got better for me. It sounds depressing, but I actually liked that it could be interpreted that way, because at the time (and right now) I don’t think I could stomach the lie. And yes, I liked the movie.
And then, of course, there is LOKI. I think WandaVision is still my favourite MCU/Disney+ series at the moment, for sheer inventiveness. But Loki is a close second.
If WandaVision reminded me a lot of Diana Wynne Jones' Hexwood in the sense that the Hex in the show operates similarly to the Hex in Hexwood - it's a geographically defined, changeable zone that creates scenarios and absorbs people to be part of it - then Loki reminds me a lot of A Tale of Time City in the sense that the TVA, like Time City, is a place that exists out of time and whose people control/stabilise the flows of time, which was in danger of being upended by a mysterious Variant/person who is also out of time. I hope to see some butter pies in this series, and more MCU series that resemble DWJ books in the future! (Maybe a Chrestomanci-like series once the Multiverse is properly set up?? Also, Homeward Bounders seem like a very MCU-appropriate story... with the Celestials playing with other beings' lives.)
Anyway, I've been talking to Shida about Loki earlier and how we think this story would lead into Multiverse of Madness, and you know what, as much as I dislike Kang the Conqueror in the comics (look, time traveling villains can get really old really fast) I am looking forward to his introduction in the MCU. Of course, I also can't wait to see if we'll get a "real" Lady Loki or if her character will be combined with Sylvie's, and of course, Kid Loki.
And YES, Loki is suitable Pride Month subject matter because Loki is genderfluid (and queer) in the comics and in the MCU, so there.
this week's updates!
- My thoughts on Diana Wynne Jones' Deep Secret, here
- There was no Animal Crossing news at all during Nintendo's E3 Direct, which was really disappointing. I was hoping for at least a mention, but Nintendo said nope. There WILL be an AC-themed mini game in Wario Ware, though.
- One of my favourite musicals, In the Heights, was recently adapted into a movie and you can see the first 8 minutes of it (the entire first song!) here. Watch it! It's great :)
- Since I'm sharing links to trailers of movies of musicals I love here's the trailer for Dear Evan Hanse, which is a musical I love with an upcoming movie adaptation, and I Ben Platt's voice is beautiful, but I'm still iffy about him playing a high schooler in a MOVIE. It's normal on stage, but weird in a movie? I dunno.
- Not a movie trailer, but one of my fave West End shows is going on Broadway and this is the trailer and I need bootlegs, stat.
- Okay, I will stop now, please continue to stay safe, folks <3