Letter #70.5: Eine Kleine BTSmusik

Good morning, Erin.

I love storytelling tropes. Cliches. Literary conventions. They don’t even have to be done particularly well or employed cleverly for me to love them. Which is not a secret. And, I think, safe to say you are already very much aware. 

It’s not a blanket love, of course: simply being a cliche or trope doesn’t automatically endear me to whatever storytelling element we’re dealing with. I’m sure I’ve mentioned some of them, here and there, in terms of specific moments from specific shows, if not outright the trope itself. Though I tend not to harp on them, since my distaste for most of them never quite reaches a level equivalent for those that excite me—and you know I like to point out when those show up. (I mean, how many times have I mentioned the “oh no we have to pretend we’re dating” cliche? Enough that you recommended Be My Boyfriend to me, at least.)

Even so, there’s one I’ve particularly never much liked, because I find it…insipid, in the same way adolescent poetry is always so vapid and simplistic yet always wrapped in the assumption that something profound is being said. It’s this line or sentiment that comes up all the time in anime (at least, that’s where I tend to see it) where characters express their affections—of all stripes—for other characters who are in different locations (because they moved or went on a long trip) by explaining they take comfort in knowing that they are looking at the same night sky as their crushes or loved ones or whatever they are. 

It’s not that I don’t like the sentiment, but it’s A) not all that impressive a statement on its own, and B) its overuse has made it lose whatever small meaning it may have originally had. 

And yet, on Saturday, in the middle of my nightly walk, I found myself suddenly stopped at a street corner, staring up at the moon, gawking at it as though I had never seen anything like it in my entire life. It seemed so…preternaturally bright, so clear and yet also somehow alluringly hazy, as if I were glimpsing it through sheer curtains as it prepared for bed. 

…which is when it happened: “I hope Erin sees this,” I said to myself, smiling up into the night sky. 

It was another two blocks of constantly glancing up at the moon through the trees like a smitten child before I realized what I had sort of done and laughed at how easily I’d slipped into it, despite all my mindful distaste for the trope. 

Then again, I don’t know how else I could have reacted to that scene—since, as I discovered when I returned to my apartment, I’d been staring up at a Strawberry Moon.

How’s that for “one scoop,” hm?

“Yes, yes, yes—but, ineffable synchronicities of the firmament aside,” I hear you say, “I was promised BTS. Will you make a liar of your epistolary nomenclature?”

Well, fear not, seonbae: we are moments away from that very thing.

Or, well, to temper your excitement, we are moments away from a fairly brief discussion of the miscellaneous BTS assignments you gave me. Which is certainly not the “the boys visit towns” reaction commentary I’m sure you were most looking forward to, but…how else was I going to have space to give you so much preamble about the moon?

PART I: The Whisper Game

1. I love this game, and it will never not be hilarious to watch people play it. 

2. J-Hope absolutely killed me. He was always so unsure—and rightly so!—that he was being given something to pass along that made any sense, but he’d just shrug and roll with it. It wouldn’t be my first choice as a strategy, but it sure as heck made me laugh.

2A. Having J-Hope switch from giving clues to Jimin to receiving clues from Jimin was just…wrong. Jimin’s so, so bad at the game. Again, it was hilarious, but it was not a nice thing to do to poor J-Hope. 

3. Suga, in the starting position, had some of the worst mouth-enunciating I can imagine. Yet more nonsense for poor J-Hope to endure, later on. 

4. AND YET…J-Hope mostly always figured it out and passed it along, and he and Suga excitedly laughing with each other over their assured success was delightful to watch. 

5. But the best part of the first round was Jin pulling Jimin outta the fire for almost every bat**** crazy nonsense clue he would give him. 

6. Then we got to the second round, which featured my boy V, RM, and the one I can never remember which is how I know he’s Jungkook. And I was very excited, because my faves were up and could not possibly be worse that Jimin, who is the worst whisper game player I’ve ever seen. 

7. …except no, V was somehow even worse than Jimin—and even Jin couldn’t save them. 

7A. I mean, RM and Jungkook, on the other hand, were both very good, so it’s not even like there was blame to go around. Ugh, my heart. 

8. For the record: I’d totally watch a TV series that is just BTS playing the whisper game. 

PART II: Songs

You recommended: BTS - “Cypher 4,” “UGH;” Suga - “Daechwita,” “Haegum.”

1. Um…pass.

2. By which I mean I didn’t think any of them was my cup of tea. Which means my adoration for the “Mic Drop” remix may have been misleading, in the end, because the thing I love about the remix is not what makes it similar to the tracks you mentioned. When it comes to things in the realm of hip-hop, it seems a lot of my opinion of a particular track will depend on the music that goes along with the rapping. And, in each of these cases, I just wasn’t feeling it—particularly if they used that…I don’t know how to describe it properly…that dissonant kind of trap-y sound that makes me fast-forward through sections of EDM compilations. 

3. But speaking of music: I’m looping “Prisoner in Your Heart” by Asle Sey & Laurence Wilkins as I write this letter. Which…I have no idea if you’d like that.

PART III: RM’s Book List & the YouTuber Review

1. So…yeah, that’s quite the list. Eclectic, of course, as I think anyone who looks it over would say (and probably has said)—though, as the YouTuber who talked about a chunk of the list said, there is absolutely a pattern to the themes. It speaks well of him that he is open to so many different voices, though I’d also point out that, given the thematic similarities, there isn’t too much variety in the variety of voices. Which is less a criticism than a (to me) necessary clarification.  

2. I recognized about half of the books on the list, though I’ve only read a couple of them. The rest of the ones I recognized, though, were books that never jumped out at me as something I wanted to read. Which makes me wonder if I’d react similarly to the other half. 

3. There’s…a lot of Haruki Murakami on that list. I’ve read some of his stuff, and I always feel like everything he writes has one too many layers of things going on, like he’s not satisfied telling a compelling story about human existence unless it also has this totally other bonkers story happening on top of it. (Which, for some reason, usually has a woman asking a man his preferences for oral sex, if memory serves.)

3A. I mean, I think I mentioned that I literally cut one of his books in half for this reason. And that I threw the second half away. 

3B.  Or, hey, maybe that’s just the stuff of his I’ve read. Maybe the rest of it isn’t anywhere near as self-indulgent, and I have as bad a nose for Murakami as I do for K-dramas. Maybe I need RM to make my picks for me. 

4. I also watched the video by that YouTuber (Jack…whatever his name is) you mentioned. And, while I appreciate his pattern recognition work in roughly categorizing the books on RM’s list, I have a bone to pick with him, English major to English major. Which is to say I think it is HILARIOUS how off the mark some of his analysis of the books he talked about is. In particular, I found it laughable that he so often dipped into utopian idealist interpretations of the themes presented in the dystopian novels he’d read—which was DOUBLY HILARIOUS to me because of how he repeatedly claimed he was a big fan of 1984. 

PART IV: The BTS Universe

1. I think some of this is absolute genius, and I think some of this is…whatever. 

2. I really like the whole Smeraldo Flower blog idea. I think that’s the most interesting and most fun aspect of the whole interconnected whatnot—specifically because it is the most indirectly related part of the whole thing. It’s like an ARG, requiring fans to do some outside research, stumble upon things, uncover connections on their own. It’s not perfect, by the metrics I’d personally use to describe how exciting it is, but it’s by far the part that caught my attention the most. 

2A. And, as a fan of time travel, I am particularly fond of how the contents of the 8th and 9th blog posts eventually changed to reflect that Jin had done something to alter the timeline. It’s a really nice touch. 

2B. Also, just to say: I’ve done things vaguely—and I mean vaguely—like this a couple of times, and it’s always been great fun. Impressive, in hindsight? Probably not. But certainly fun.

3. The rest of it, though…I have mixed feelings about. It’s fun that they’re telling a hidden story over multiple videos and inside liner notes and things like that. And I’m sure I would have loved to get in on the whole process of putting things together at the time, even if I was just watching other people do it. But when it comes down to the overt recognition of what the story is (that is, when they start to release a comic and a series of…I dunno, journal entries or whatever of fictionalized version of themselves), I start to lose interest. Not because I don’t care for the story itself (...though that is also true), but because it ceases to become much of a mystery, which is the part that catches my attention. I understand that you still had to line up events to really piece together what was happening, but once it becomes scrambled YA fan fiction, I feel like it’s morphed into a very different thing. 

4. Of course, in a sense, it’s brilliant that it’s just scrambled YA fan fiction, because that’s soooo very much the market they’re grabbing. 

5. At the same time, though…I don’t really understand why the whole thing is what it is. Like, was it always planned to be like this? Was it just marketing? Did it start as one thing and then turn into something else? I don’t think I came across an explanation of the origins or intentions of the whole undertaking, but I’d love to hear about it. 

And that’s all I’ve got about that. Which I’m sure was somehow both not enough and way too much. 

I continue to be charmed by these guys, which I’m sure is no surprise to you. And I’m sure I will be just as charmed by their adventures out and about in the world. 

When I get to them.

Eventually. 

—Daryl